Highlights:

  • According to the New York-based firm Cybersyn, businesses rely increasingly on data science and analytics to boost operational effectiveness and corporate decision-making.
  • The organization claims that if datasets are not constructed properly, their information is complex, opaque, and static, making it challenging to extract insightful data from them.

Data-as-a-service startup Cybersyn Inc. exited covert mode recently with a substantial USD 69.2 in seed funding.

Coatue and Sequoia Capital also participated in the Series A funding round, led by cloud data warehouse titan Snowflake Inc. Cybersyn, founded by former Coatue head of data science and current CEO Alex Izydorczyk, whose mission is to make public and private economic datasets more accessible to enterprise decision-makers.

According to the New York-based startup, businesses rely increasingly on data science and analytics to enhance business decision-making and operational efficiency. But it believes businesses need more information than the internal data they acquire to assist in this endeavor. Cybersyn intends to provide this supplementary data in the form of conventional third-party datasets.

Although external datasets that may be looped into business models are abundant, businesses confront various challenges in adopting them. According to Cybersyn, the first problem is that finding datasets linked to a certain topic can be time-consuming. Once a corporation understands where to obtain the data it requires, it usually has to spend significant effort engineering or formatting the data to make it usable. According to the business, if datasets are not correctly constructed, their information is complicated, opaque, and static, making it impossible to extract meaningful insights from them.

Here, Cybersyn comes into play. It focuses specifically on economic datasets. It seeks out public and proprietary economic data and converts them into commercially relevant datasets that business decision-makers can use immediately. The corporation’s information is valuable for market intelligence, investments, and policy decisions.

Cybersyn searches the internet for public data sources and collaborates with third parties to produce proprietary data. Some of its datasets are derived from aggregated, anonymized data from companies that are not data providers. It provides free and paid datasets on Snowflake’s marketplace, with examples including e-commerce purchasing data that could be useful to businesses in the financial services, consumer goods, and retail sectors.

The Snowflake Marketplace is one of the largest marketplaces for third-party datasets, allowing businesses to acquire data that can be combined with their internal data. There are currently over 1,800 dataset listings available.

According to Izydorczyk, Cybersyn helps businesses needing more technological know-how convert data into useful information. He said, “There is a wealth of data that goes unused because the individuals with the technical expertise to analyze it are often not the same individuals with the business acumen to apply it effectively. We’re focused on bridging that gap.”

Apparently, for the first time, Snowflake is taking the lead in a capital round with this investment, and it’s driven by chance to grow and modernize its data marketplace.

Christian Kleinerman, Senior Vice President of Products at Snowflake, said Cybersyn is well-positioned to address the issues with data accessibility. He said, “At Snowflake, we believe in the power of data to transform business outcomes. Our partnership with Cybersyn will enable us to deliver even more valuable content to our customers on Snowflake Marketplace.”

With an emphasis on macroeconomic trends, Cybersyn said it will use the funding from the recent round to expand its eight-person team and acquire more proprietary data.

Mike Vernal, Partner at Sequoia Capital, said, “Understanding the economy in real time is a competitive advantage that cannot be achieved with internal data alone. Cybersyn’s unique combination of public and proprietary datasets will enable companies and government agencies to make decisions faster and with more precise information.”