Anomalo, a provider of data validation and documentation services for developers, today announced that it raised $5.95 million in venture capital. First Round Capital and Foundation Capital participated in the seed funding round, which is Anomalo’s first since its founding in 2018.
Data validation is a top concern for businesses reliant on big data analysis to take care of their operations, particularly when it comes to machine learning and AI evaluation of datasets. According to a recent survey of enterprise data scientists, nearly 40% of failed machine learning projects stalled during data-intensive phases such as training data preparation, algorithm training, model validation and scoring, and post-deployment enhancement.
Anomalo founders Elliot Shmukler and Jeremy Stanley met at Instacart, where they were head of growth and VP of data science, respectively. They started Anomalo with the goal of helping companies in industries including ecommerce, social media, adtech, fintech, and others manage complex data streams.
Anomalo connects to a customer’s data warehouse and validates the data almost immediately. The platform’s automated machine learning detects unusual changes, allowing developers to configure custom validations if they choose. Users can leverage Anomalo to find tables, column, and metrics in the data warehouse. It surfaces data optimal for the task at hand, prioritizing the most popular and “robustly validated” sources. Anomalo can be used as a standard cloud-based software-as-a-service solution or on a virtual private cloud (VPC) as a remotely managed in-VPC deployment, and it offers web and Slack notifications with data analyses, visualizations, and statistical summaries designed to keep developers informed.
Anomalo has no shortage of competitors in the cognitive and AI systems market, which IDC predicts will reach $77.6 billion in 2022, up from $24 billion in revenue last year. There’s Explorium, a Tel Aviv-based startup developing an automated data and feature discovery platform. Data.World is another — in September, it secured $26 million to expand its cloud-based big data catalog. Datameer offers a range of comparable data and analytics lifecycle management products. And that’s not to mention incumbents like Amazon, whose services (like SageMaker) vertically integrate data prep tools.
But all signs point to an increased investment in enterprise AI from which Anomalo will likely benefit. According to Gartner, according to a survey of executives from thousands of businesses, AI implementation grew a whopping 270% in the past four years and 37% in the past year alone. Deloitte says 62% of respondents to its corporate October 2018 report deployed some form of AI, up from 53% a year ago.
