Manta, a date lineage platform that helps enterprises understand and visualize the flow of information through the organization, has raised $35 million in a series B round of funding.
The raise comes as companies across the industrial spectrum struggle under a growing deluge of data, with countless siloed systems from SaaS applications to data lakes making it difficult to derive any kind of meaningful insights. Manta, for its part, tracks data from its origin through its entire flow to consumption, bringing visibility to the “where,” “how” and “what” of their data assets.
Data lineage and the modern tech stack
“Data management has undergone a massive transformation in the past decade, with data infrastructure growing in complexity, evolving into data ecosystems with thousands of components aimed at one goal — derive the most value from your data to inform critical business decisions,” Manta founder and CEO Tomas Kratky told VentureBeat.
Manta sits in the middle of every application in an organization’s tech stack, automatically scanning and mapping all data pipelines and data transformations — this will include data sources such as SaaS apps, data warehouses, data integration tools (i.e., ETL and ELT), APIs, Excel documents, databases and more.
“Data is the lifeblood of every organization and is the most critical asset for enterprises today,” Kratky continued. “Over the last decade, the complexity of the data stack has exploded, and most organizations struggle with several critical side effects of this complexity, including a high number of material incidents, significant risk exposure, slow change management and a significant amount of data engineering resources continuously wasted on routine, manual tasks.”
Blind spots
In essence, Manta serves to help companies eliminate all their blind spots, giving everyone a window into all their data flows. But what is the purpose — why do companies need to track all this?
Well, one use case lies in data governance, which is concerned with ensuring that a company is compliant with all the relevant laws of the land by seeing exactly what data they’re processing, and where. This is particularly important with GDPR in Europe and myriad other data privacy regulations coming into force around the globe.
Moreover, with countless companies transitioning from on-premises to cloud and hybrid infrastructure, data lineage is essential as it helps them validate their migration plan, see all the dependencies and ensure nothing is left behind in the switch.
But over and above all that, date lineage helps businesses uncover mistakes in their data management processes, and retrace their steps to get to the root of the problem.
“Data lineage can no longer be an afterthought — it’s a critical component of data management,” Kratky said. “With our level of dependency on data, businesses cannot afford incidents to happen. The complexity of data infrastructure — mixed with a lack of visibility — is an organization’s biggest enemy. Data pipelines have a tendency to break for a myriad of reasons, so one simple mistake can be extremely damaging and costly to a business.”
Funding for growth
Manta occupies a space that includes long-established incumbents such as Collibra, which recently hit a lofty $5.25 billion valuation off the back off a $250 million funding round; and Informatica, which is now a $5.6 billion publicly-traded company following its IPO last October.
Manta, meanwhile, had raised around $17 million since its inception in 2015, and with another $35 million in the bank, the company is well-financed to double down on its recent growth, which has seen it open new offices in Portugal and Ireland, and expand its headcount to more than 150.
“The funding enables us to continue our strong momentum by expanding our global presence and product development to help customers overcome blind spots in their increasingly complex data pipelines,” Kratky said.
Manta’s series B round was led by Forestay Capital, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, SAP’s venture fund SAP.io, Senovo, Credo Ventures, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and Dan Fougere.
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