Data.world Raises $50M Series C, Launches Eureka Suite of Catalog Capabilities

This week, enterprise data catalog provider data.world announced both a $50 million Series C round and a new suite of data catalog management capabilities called Eureka.

The Austin, Texas-based company’s data catalog is powered by its knowledge graph, an architectural foundation that data.world champions for its flexibility and scalability, as well as its ability to form social communities around data. Unlike traditional relational databases that show data in tables of rows and columns, knowledge graphs organize points of data in graph form, adding context to the relationships between the data and the people who use it.

Many organizations are using knowledge graphs for ML and AI applications for search, chatbots, unstructured data, and NLP, as well as for gaining insights from metadata. Data.world says knowledge graphs “provide a single, semantically organized view of an organization’s data and metadata, bridging the gap between how data consumers understand their business world and how the company generates and accesses its data.”

The Eureka suite is powered by the data.world knowledge graph and includes Eureka Automations, Eureka Action Center, Eureka Answers, and Eureka Explorer.

Eureka Automations is the company’s solution for deploying and managing a data catalog quickly and easily, as “they empower stewards and subject matter experts to curate and care for massive amounts of metadata and data, enhancing data governance through automated, intelligent policy management powered by the data.world knowledge graph.” The company says the product’s automated features help navigate the relationships between people and data by automatically organizing and tagging metadata, applying data governance policies for sensitive data, and calculating data popularity and quality scores. Data.world’s product can “compute a quality heuristic for each data source and automatically prompt upstream and downstream users of the source when the heuristic dips below a certain threshold,” along with suggesting alternate data sources when necessary.

Eureka Action Center is an analytics dashboard homepage for actionable insights that “[operationalizes] the catalog for active metadata management and governance” through key metrics. This is where users can find alerts, recently viewed datasets, and configurable browse cards. It is the window into an organization’s data that allows data producers, data consumers, and data product managers to focus on the most important data for decision making.

Eureka Action Center dashboard. Source: data.world

Eureka Answers is a graph search engine that “surfaces the most relevant concepts from the knowledge graph to the top of search.” This is helpful for users who are looking for particular use cases or metrics not easily found through direct query.

Finally, Eureka Explorer, which will be available in fall 2022, is a map of data and relationships that features navigable graph visualizations and delivers “an enriched view of metadata for a more valuable, contextual catalog.” The company says there is a need for this in the modern data stack because of the difficulty with management and accessibility that traditional data catalogs can have with increased volume and diversity of ingested data.

Data.world just hosted its Spring Summit 2022 on Thursday, and those interested in a demo of the Eureka platform can watch a replay of the event here. Featured in the event were diverse topics and discussions, including a session on designing and building enterprise knowledge graphs led by Principal Technologist at Amazon, Ora Lassila, and Principal Scientist at data.world, Juan Sequeda. There was also a panel discussion about data mesh architecture with participants from data.world, Snowflake, Indeed, and Monte Carlo.

After this week’s $50 million Series C round, led by Goldman Sachs, data.world stands at $132.3 million in funding and seems poised for growth with plans for global expansion, hiring of new talent, and product development.

“Leaders understand the importance of extracting key insights from their data to drive their business or organization, but they have struggled to put in place the necessary infrastructure to do so broadly across their departments and teams,” said Brett Hurt, co-founder and CEO of data.world. “We look forward to collaborating with our partners, including Goldman Sachs, to dramatically expand our product offerings, open new markets, and provide companies with solutions that drive data literacy, access, and usability all powered by our knowledge graph. We are quickly becoming the most deployed data tool within our customers and will continue to evolve our data catalog platform into the front office for data and analytics work.”

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