Creating unique data products requires significant investments and many companies struggle to hire the right talent, identify profitable use cases, and transform their data into a revenue-generating asset. Instead, they are trapped in the development of intricate infrastructure primarily serving internal dashboards.
After engaging with numerous data practitioners, Eric Hansander and Rebecka Storm (who worked with the data science team at Swedish fintech unicorn iZettle) found that tech companies invest countless hours into building supposedly distinctive internal data tools. Having realised to conclude that if companies could avoid building these tools themselves, the return on investment would become more favourable.
Consequently, they founded Twirl in 2022, enabling data teams to concentrate on constructing valuable and business-specific data applications.
$2.5M pre-seed funding
In a recent development, Sweden-based Twirl, the fully managed data platform, just secured $2.5 million in pre-seed funding. The investment round was led by Creandum, a European early-stage investor that recently backed Timberhub, Prewave and Mason alongsidr participation from Cocoa and other angel investors.
The fresh funds will enable Twirl continue to grow its team and open up for more customers to join its beta program as it works with the mission to help every company solve its data engineering problems.
“Today you can launch a web app in 15 minutes, but setting up a data platform often takes weeks or months. The best tech companies have figured it out – but only after investing hundreds of person-years developing powerful tools and platforms. Twirl lets any company fast-forward to a mature data environment so they can focus on their core business,” said Eric Hansander, co-founder and CEO of Twirl.
“So many companies have over-invested in their data stacks. It’s easy to see why: you start simple with easy-to-use tools, but as you run into their limits you keep having to add more tools and more code to glue them together. And you still have to engineer your own solutions to fill the gaps. We built Twirl to solve all the common data engineering challenges that typically appear, once and for all, so you don’t have to,” added Rebecka Storm, co-founder of Twirl.
“Twirl offers the data superpowers of companies like Spotify and Kry to any company, without needing a huge team of data engineers. In just a few months, the team has built a best-in-class platform and got customers up and running, and it’s hard to imagine better positioned co-founders to build this,” said Sabina Wizander, Partner at Creandum.
“Rebecka and Eric are a uniquely powerful founding duo. They know what they are doing – after years of leading data teams at some of the world’s greatest tech scale-ups, they are now building the data framework they always wished existed. And they know how to do it: the intensity, speed and quality of their execution is remarkable,“ stated Carmen Rico, founder at Cocoa Ventures.
Unified data platform for AI and analytics
Twirl is a convenient tool that helps data teams work with data easily. It allows them to transform and analyse data for tasks like machine learning and AI. With Twirl, data teams can create and test data pipelines using different programming languages like SQL and Python, and process data in batches or streams.
In addition, Twirl eliminates the need to use multiple tools like Airflow, dbt, Docker, and Kubernetes for specific tasks.
Some users deploy Twirl to automate credit decisions or to gather and present user statistics and progress reports in a language-learning app. In some cases, the tool has completely replaced the need to hire a data engineering team.
