Highlights:

  • Lightup announced recently that Spectrum 28 Capital, Shasta Ventures, Vela Partners, and Incubate Fund also participated in the investment.
  • Based in Mountain View, California, Lightup is a platform that identifies problems in data pipelines. A data pipeline is a software workflow that transfers data automatically between applications.

Lightup Data Inc., a startup that assists businesses in detecting when their applications consume incorrect or stale data, has raised USD 9 million in seed funding.

Co-leading the Series A round were Andreessen Horowitz and Newland Ventures. Lightup announced recently that Spectrum 28 Capital, Vela Partners, Shasta Ventures, and Incubate Fund also participated in the investment. To date, the company has raised a total of USD 20.7 million.

Manu Bansal, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, said, “The funding will further accelerate and extend our development and delivery of even greater capabilities in the Lightup platform to streamline data quality processes and increase time-to-insight.”

Based in Mountain View, California, Lightup is a platform that identifies problems in data pipelines. A data pipeline is a software workflow that transfers data automatically between applications. Such workflows may, for instance, transmit product availability information from a retailer’s inventory monitoring system to its supply chain planning tool.

Failures in a company’s data pipeline can disrupt its analytics initiatives. If a pipeline that supplies sales data to a dashboard for monitoring revenue begins to deliver outdated sales data, the dashboard will become inaccurate. Similar issues can arise when datasets are delivered with absent or duplicate fields.

To identify such errors, businesses implement so-called data quality tests. These algorithms autonomously examine the data moving through a pipeline for potential errors. Lightup’s platform enables such tests to be implemented in minutes instead of the typical months.

It enables programmers to construct data quality evaluations via a no-code interface. The company’s platform determines the typical information traffic within a data pipeline. The system then identifies documents deviating from the pattern, indicating an error may have occurred.

If a pipeline typically processes 500 megabytes of data daily, Lightup’s platform can generate an alert if that capacity falls to 300 megabytes. This decline could indicate that the pipeline failed to process some records.

The platform can identify changes in the volume of data traveling through a pipeline as well as the phenomena described by the data.

A retailer may have a pipeline that transfers sales records to an analytics application for processing. Lightup claims that its platform could detect an abrupt decrease in the average purchase value described by sales records. After two months of single-digit weekly growth, the platform can detect more imperceptible shifts, such as an abrupt 10% weekly increase in the average purchase value.

Users can customize the data types and conditions under which the platform detects data changes. According to the startup, its platform’s machine learning models identify anomalous data elements. Customers can utilize their own data to increase the accuracy of the trained models.

The company claims numerous Fortune 500 companies, including McDonald’s Corporation and Gap Inc., utilize its platform. Lightup asserts that its recurring revenue has multiplied by five over the past year due to robust demand but does not provide specifics. The recent announcement of a USD 9 million funding round will enable the startup to hire more employees, develop new features for its platform, and expand its partner ecosystem.