YZR, a French tech startup using AI to normalise data, has just raised $12 million in Series A funding. The round was co-led by Nauta Capital invested in Munich-based Climedo and London-based Hullabaloo and Orange Ventures.
This is the first investment from Nauta Capital in a French startup. On the other hand, Orange Ventures has already invested in a handful of Series A rounds.
In 2021, YZR raised over $2 million in seed funding from major French tech investors, including the founders of Blablacar and Criteo.
Utilisation of funds
Amidst rapid growth, YZR plans to use the fresh capital to scaleup its operations, improve its product, specifically in health and consumer data, and make strategic key hires.
The startup also wants to widen its global reach by penetrating both European and US markets, with plans to set up a US subsidiary. Notably, the company intends to be a dominant player in the US markets.
Sébastien Garcin, YZR President explained: “This fundraising confirms that our vision is the right one: there’s always more tools and more algorithms to make data, but yet no solution that would allow these tools to communicate with each other. The times when data scientists would take long hours everyday to normalize data are over.”
Jean-Philippe Poisson, YZR General Manager said: “This fundraising campaign is a huge success, and we are extremely proud of it. Thanks to our new partners Nauta Capital and Orange Ventures, we have the means for our global ambitions. We are now preparing for a successful entry into the US market.”
Pratima Aiyagari, Nauta Capital Venture Partner said: “Different business entities within an organisation need a common data format so they can all speak the same language and prep the data for business analysis. We are happy to partner with YZR in this next phase of growth as the company continues to expand its technical offerings and geographic presence.”
Jérôme Berger, Orange Ventures President and Managing Partner added: “We are eager to invest in YZR, whose mission will help us to multiply the capacities of use of data – a highly strategic sector to which we at Oranges Ventures attach great importance. It is also a manifestation of our full confidence in French Tech, whose talent YZR will help to shine around the world.”
AI to normalise data
Founded in 2019 by Founders Arjun Chatterjee, Jean-Philippe Poisson, and Sébastien Garcin, YZR is on a mission to normalise data, and save a lot of time for employees in the process.
Besides its mission, YZR pursues strong social ambitions to make the tech sector more diverse and inclusive. In partnership with 50inTech, YZR maintains gender and real wage equality as well as career development opportunities. It adopts a workplace culture where employees will be valued and respected.
YZR has been supported by 50 Partners for 2 years. Also, it was declared the winner of the Galion Booster award in 2020.
“The team’s experience, the relevance of its solution, and the depth of the market quickly convinced us of YZR’s strong potential.” stated Jérôme Masurel, 50 Partners CEO.
What does YZR do?
YZR has created a no-code, plug-and-play, data preparation platform that makes it easier, better, and faster to normalise and prepare data for downstream ingestion. Their AI-powered standardisation, labelling, and context-understanding software has in-depth sector specific semantic knowledge to quickly enable business units to draw value from it.
With AI, YZR simplifies the work of 54 million data workers in the world who are currently standardising data manually using spreadsheets such as Excel. The startup provides its solution to retail and e-commerce leaders such as Monoprix or La Redoute to automatically standardise product data from their suppliers.
