The shift to self-service analytics has resulted in an influx of demanding data customers who have come to rely on data to run their businesses successfully. As data teams grew to meet these demands, so did the complexity of the data environments they managed, posing significant challenges in data quality, data discoverability, and cost control.
Tallinn-based Alvin solves these issues by applying software testing and monitoring concepts to data engineering, allowing professionals to maximise the value of their data. Alvin’s toolkit provides an automated way for data teams to prevent bugs, trace errors, and identify inefficiencies.
Alvin, a SaaS data lineage company, has raised $6M in seed funding from Project A Ventures, with participation from Icebreaker.vc, Nomad Capital, and angel investors Chris Shagen (Former CMO, Contentful), Nick Handel (CEO & Co-Founder at Transform), and Ragnar Sass (Co-Founder at Pipedrive). The company that automates data lineage across the modern data stack has further announced the release of its toolkit. Alvin’s software maps connections between data assets and their consumers across systems and uses this to improve data analytics workflow efficiency.
The funds will be used to expand the engineering team in order to meet the company’s ambitious roadmap and carry out its go-to-market strategy.
New toolkit
The core technology underlying Alvin’s toolkit automatically creates and maintains a highly accurate graph dataset representing the relationships between columns, tables, dashboards, SaaS platforms, and people. The platform then uses this dataset to provide teams with an automated way to detect and trace pipeline errors/bugs, reducing data downtime. It also automates regression testing, providing a detailed report of downstream impact prior to code deployment, as well as cost optimization by identifying and safely removing unused assets and pipelines.
Dan Mashiter (previously at Gousto and data privacy startup people.io) and Martin Sahlen founded Alvin in 2018. (formerly technical founder at Unacast).
“Businesses are rightly shifting focus from how much data they collect and store, to its quality, availability, usability and ROI”, says Dan Mashiter, Co-Founder of Alvin. “By automatically mapping data flows within and across systems, and how it is consumed throughout the business, Alvin is building the operating system for the modern data stack. Alvin gives data teams the tools to measure and improve the key metrics they will now be judged on, and ultimately maximize their impact”.
Uwe Horstmann, General Partner Project A, says: “Alvin is going to make the lives of everyone handling big data much easier. Martin and Dan have a proven track record in data-driven companies and they have built a great system to help companies trace, analyze and govern data more effectively.”
