Soda, an AI-enabled data quality startup based in Brussels, has raised $14 million investment from strategic partners and existing investors including Singular (which invested in Synthflow and Aikido Security) and Point Nine.
The additional investment will be used to further build Soda’s global team, expanding its New York headquarters with experienced go-to-market talent to continue its growth in North America. The next step for the platform will focus on integrating AI into the workflow of data engineers to suggest and automate testing and observability for the data layer.
What does the company do?
Founded by Maarten Masschelein and Tom Baeyens, Soda works with the mission to stop bad data disrupting good business. It believes that everyone should be able to share and use data they can trust. It is passionate about getting this right and enabling data teams to catch data issues as early as possible, and prevent any downstream impact.
The company has already made significant investments in becoming a GenAI-first platform, pioneering the use of GenAI for data quality testing with the introduction of SodaGPT in 2023, and continuing to release new AI features under the recently announced Soda AI umbrella. Soda AI is a growing suite of data quality tools designed to increase productivity which includes SodaGPT, Anomaly Detection, and OpenAI Assistants.
The company boasts extensive global community support, fueled by the release of Soda Core in 2020, its OSS tool that helps thousands of data teams test data and prevent data issues.
Soda has since then expanded this offering to data observability to provide customers with a last line of defence to detect issues in production, and improve the time to debug and resolve issues. Over the past year, Soda has also pioneered the creation and adoption of data contracts, making it easier for data teams to manage the data they publish as an API, just like they would in software engineering.
Soda’s platform has received industry recognition from Gartner, Thoughtspot, and Modern Data Stack. Soda serves hundreds of customers and thousands of community members around the world, including Disney, HelloFresh, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Bloomberg.
“Over the past 12 months, Soda has charted a course to financial self-sustainability which has been reliant on a world class team, valued and active support from a global community of users, and an unwavering vision to democratize data quality,” explained Maarten Masschelein, CEO, Soda. “It’s been a challenging year for a lot of technology companies, which is why we are proud to have achieved self-sustainability whilst keeping our team intact. We now welcome this additional funding support to give us the strongest possible platform to capitalise on the huge investment in AI which has highlighted the critical value of data quality.”
What do we think about Soda?
Soda’s AI-enabled data quality platform is poised for significant growth with its $14 million investment, bolstering its New York expansion and AI integration efforts. By pioneering GenAI for data quality testing and fostering a robust global community, Soda addresses critical data trust issues. Serving major clients like Disney and Bloomberg, it’s well-positioned to capitalise on the increasing importance of data quality in the AI era.