Avo, a startup that helps companies better manage data quality across teams, announced today that it has raised a $ 3 million seed round led by GGV Capital, with the participation of Heavybit, Y Combinator and others.
Company founder Stefania Olafsdóttir, who currently resides in Iceland, was previously the head of data science at QuizUp, which at one point had 100 million users worldwide. "I had the opportunity to create the Data Science Division, and that meant the cultural aspect of helping people ask and answer the right questions - and get them curious about the data - but it also meant the technical part of setting up the infrastructure and tools and pipelines, so people can get the right answers when they need them, "he told me. "We were early adopters of self-service product analytics and culture and have struggled immensely with data reliability and trust."
As companies collect more data across products and teams, the process tends to become cumbersome and different teams end up using different methods (or just different tags), which creates inefficiencies and problems in the data pipeline.
"At first, that unreliable data only slowed down the decision-making process, because people were like, they didn't understand the data and needed to ask questions," Olafsdóttir said of his time at QuizUp. "But then it led us to actually launch invalid product updates based on incorrect data." Over time, that problem has become more evident.
"Once organizations realize just how big this problem is - they are actually flying blind due to unreliable data, while their competition could be like taking the lead in the market - the default is to put together a series. clunky processes and tools that partially raise the level of accountability, "he said. And that clunky process typically involves a product manager and a spreadsheet today.
In the center, the Avo the team decided to build a better process around this, and after some detours and other product ideas, Olafsdóttir and his co-founders came together to focus on exactly this problem during their time in Combiner Y program.
Avo offers developers, data scientists and product managers a shared workspace to develop and optimize their data pipelines. "Good product analysis is the product of collaboration between these cross-functional stakeholder groups," says Olafsdóttir, and Avo's goal is to provide these groups with a platform for their analytical planning and governance - and for setting standards. company-wide on how they create their analytics events.
Once that's done, Avo provides developers with secure analytic code and debugger that allows them to take those snippets and add them to their code in minutes. For some companies, this new process can help them go from 10 hours solving a specific analytics problem to an hour or less.
Most companies, the team argues, know - deep inside - that they can't fully trust their data. But they often don't know how to solve this problem. To help them with this, Avo also released its Inspector product today. This tool processes event streams for a business, visualizes them, and then highlights potential errors. This could be a type mismatch, missing properties, or other discrepancies. In many ways, this is obviously a great sales tool for a service that aims to avoid exactly these problems.
One of Avo's first customers is Rappi, the Latin American delivery service. "This year we have adapted to meet the demand of 100,000 new customers digitizing their deliveries and roadside pickups. The problem with each new version of the software was that we stopped scanning. It accounted for 25% of our Jira tickets, "said Damian Sima, Head of Engineering at Rappi." With Avo we create analysis schemes in advance, identify analysis problems quickly, add consistency over time and ensure data reliability while we help customers serve the more than 12 million monthly users attracted to their businesses. "
Like most startups at this stage, Avo plans to use the new funding to build their team and continue to develop their product.
"The next trillion-dollar software market will be driven from the ground up, with developers deciding which tools to use to create digital transformation in each industry. Avo provides engineers with ease of implementation while maintaining the frameworks and analytical governance for product leaders, "said GGV Capital CEO Glenn Solomon. "Our investment in Avo is an investment in software developers as new kingmakers and product leaders as new oracles."
