Why we invested in Solidatus?
Perspective, by Jay Wilson
Posted
Data is exploding on every dimension: volume, complexity, cost, and risk and data models are changing frequently.
Organisations are today ill equipped to understand what data is held, where, in what format, how it is connected and to which systems, and what it can be used for. In regulated industries, organisations bear the additional obligation of having to adjust how data is used due to changing regulations and reporting requirements, often in real time. Organisations feel this pain on myriad fronts: increasing regulatory costs (compliance, reporting, data retention), IT costs from holding duplicate data, poor levels of customer service, lost revenue opportunities, business interruptions, and low productivity of expensive technical talent. These issues are now ubiquitous – a day does not go by without a data related headline!
While ubiquitous, fathoming the scale of these issue is hard. For example, underpinning Federal Reserve reporting across regulated Financial Institutions in the US are often hundreds of software applications connected in a complex web to thousands of data tables often held in disparate silos. One data field out of line can cost institutions millions of dollars in fines and remedial action. Perhaps more detrimental are the manual or overengineered processes organisations use to address these issues today which can run to $100m.
Solidatus, the leader in the emergent category of data lineage, was developed to help organisations shed light on these issues, understanding how data flows through an organisation’s systems by providing lineage, discovery and visualisation solutions.
The company is fundamentally reshaping the way data is managed across the most data rich and complex organisations, making them more performant, more compliant while reducing costs and significantly increasing the value of the data estate.
The co-founders Philip Dutton and Philip Miller, who are experts in the field having worked on complex data management projects for over two decades, launched Solidatus in 2018. The first version of the software was built to support their consulting work and from there Solidatus grew rapidly into a product business with an expanding roster of marquee enterprise customers. Recognising the ubiquity of the issues they solve and the growing complexity and prominence of data management the co-founders decided to raise a Series A round of funding to fully capture the market opportunity and accelerate the company’s growth.
As data is increasingly becoming organisations’ most valuable asset, it is needless to say that Solidatus is seeing widespread demand. It supports customers across aerospace, manufacturing, telecommunications, and government, and has four of the top 10 Globally Systemically Important Banks (GSIBs) in the European and US markets as clients. In the past year Solidatus has doubled in size, quadrupled its revenue, was awarded the Best Data Governance Solution by Data Management Insights, joined the ranks of the RegTech 100, and become the only new entrant to the Gartner Magic Quadrant in Metadata Management; one of the youngest companies to attain placement in the Quadrant’s history and we are delighted to have led the company’s Series A. We are excited to welcome Philip and Philip and the company to AlbionVC’s portfolio. We get excited when we meet companies that blend exceptional engineering capabilities with unique domain expertise and rapid market traction – everything Solidatus has in spades.
This funding recognises the company’s impressive progress in a short period of time: the clarity of the co-founder’s vision and the execution capability to bring to market a best-in-class product, but also signifies the beginning of an exciting growth journey that will see the company help more customers in more regions in more verticals solve their data management challenges. We very much look forward to working with the co-founders, and our co-investors HSBC and Citi Corp to realise the company’s bold ambition.
We are excited to find the next generation start-up in DataOps so if you leading the way in data fabric, data quality, data observability or adjacent segments we would love to hear from you.
This funding recognises the company’s impressive progress in a short period of time: the clarity of the co-founder’s vision and the execution capability to bring to market a best-in-class product, but also signifies the beginning of an exciting growth journey that will see the company help more customers in more regions in more verticals solve their data management challenges.
Jay Wilson, Investment Director
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