Y42 startup raises $31 million to build first scalable data platform

The round was co-led by Atomico and New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insignt Partners, with participation from La Famiglia and Data Community Fund. Atomico partner Irina Haivas will join Y42’s board as part of the investment.

With a full data lifecycle approach, Y42 takes aim at the siloed and expensive modern data stack, where many companies find themselves paying heavy subscriptions to disparate services that do not communicate together.

This includes separate tools for data orchestration, ingestion, and visualisation, often maintained by a bevy of outside consultants because they are too complex and resource-heavy to handle in-house.

Many large firms stitch together five or more tools, while for startups it means resorting to an ever-expanding bunch of spreadsheets. Globally, Y42 estimates that currently 12,000 companies annually try to adopt a modern data stack – with many of them unable to do so.

A product screenshot

“Data is not a tech problem, it's a business problem. Y42’s platform can turn any company into a data business, and any person into a data analyst,” said Y42 CEO and founder Hung Dang.“While the core data flow challenges of the modern data stack – moving, manipulating and visualising data – are being solved, we can already see the next wave of innovation will happen around metadata, with things like cataloguing, lineage, orchestration, quality checks, audits, and access control. As an end-to-end solution, we have a clear advantage for this next generation of products.”

Founder Hung Dang

“Every business leader today knows they need to extract more value from their data, but the data talent to adopt and maintain a modern stack is scarce; demand for data engineers is growing 50 per cent annually. Y42 unlocks this bottleneck, and makes data tools more accessible for everyone. In that, they are creating a new category,” said Atomico partner Irina Haivas.

“By empowering anyone and any company to be in the business of data with their innovative end-to-end solution, Y42 is re-imagining the modern data stack,” said George Mathew, managing director at Insight Partners. “Using Y42, companies can draw data-driven insights quicker, scale more efficiently, and optimise resources. We at Insight are delighted to be part of this next phase of Y42’s exciting journey."

Y42 will use its Series A funding round to continue accelerating the development of its platform, building out its customer base and scaling its team.

The Y42 team

The Y42 solution is an all- in- one data ingestion, analysis, and sharing platform that’s easy to use, interoperable, and designed to scale in tandem with a company’s growth. It is aimed at business intelligence leaders and analysts that aspire to own the company’s data and inject rigour into its decision making. These are people who are dissatisfied with the high maintenance load, lack of interoperability, and barriers to scale offered by legacy players.