Is your company data-ready?

The exponential growth of data means that organizations need to find solutions to collect, store, analyze, and leverage data to inform decision-making. But instead of focusing on transforming data into actionable insights, many organizations are drowning in data. In fact, according to an HBR survey in 2019, 69% of organizations are not leveraging data to their advantage by becoming a data-driven organization. An increasingly popular solution for many organizations is to use data catalogs to automate data assets through metadata administration so that these catalogs can act as a single source of data knowledge for an enterprise. 

There are many big-name players involved in the data catalog space, including public companies IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services. Private companies are gaining recognition as well. Among them, Segment’s work in data has had the most success, second to Twilio, whom we talked about yesterday and who snapped up Segment for $3.2BN in November last year. California-based Alation and Belgium-based Collibra are similar competitors that have had success in scaling their businesses by helping enterprises with machine learning data catalog services. 

• Alation is a Series C company that last raised funding in January 2019. 
• Collibra, a unicorn, raised its Series F in April 2020.

🛡 Data Security
When the public talks about data, we often associate data with security and how data are protected. Security breaches and concomitant compliance with data regulations such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CPA) are imperative. Startups like Rubrik, Cohesity, and Bigid, to name a few, are enterprise-ready solutions for helping safeguard sensitive data.

• Rubrik is one of the most highly valued, having raised over $500MM in funding and recognized as a Leader in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions.
• Cohesity, another unicorn, has raised over $650MM, including a Round E funding of $250MM in April 2020. It recently released a data-management-as-a-service offering in partnership with AWS.
• Bigid, a soon-to-be unicorn, has raised 6 rounds of funding already with its most recent funding in December 2020, led by Salesforce and Tiger Global Management.

🏢 Top growth enterprise software

• Not surprisingly, Tanium, who topped our list of top growth companies for enterprise software, focuses on cybersecurity and protecting data stored on the cloud.