Data observability platform Acceldata raises $50M

Acceldata, the company behind a data observability platform used by multinational enterprises including Oracle and Verisk, today announced it has raised $50 million in a Series C round of funding.

Founded in 2018, San Jose-based Acceldata is one of a growing number of companies setting out to help organizations understand the health of their data, and identify any problems with data that may be spread across multiple clouds, applications, and systems.

With pre-built integrations for the likes of Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and more, Acceldata can be used to assess the quality of a company’s data in transit or at rest, while also giving insights into the infrastructure underpinning their data pipelines.

“To build trust in data, the flow of information from multiple sources needs to be streamlined and efficiently managed through data pipelines,” Acceldata CEO and cofounder Rohit Choudhary explained to TechCrunch. “This not only supports analytics initiatives but also maximizes business value. Moreover, data observability ensures that the data used for analytical and governance purposes is suitable and meets its intended goals.”

Recession-proof?

Despite all the plummeting valuations, down-rounds and layoffs impacting the tech world, there has been a growing sense over the past year that the observability vertical could be just a little recession-proof. By way of example, the likes of Observe, Monte Carlo, Cribl, Manta, and Coralogix all raised substantial amounts of funding last year, while in the five short weeks of 2023 so far we’ve already seen two fledgling observability startups in the form of Metaplane and Chaos Genius announce $8.4 million and $3.3 million seed funding rounds respectively.

It’s worth noting that not all “observability” companies are created equally, with some focusing exclusively on more traditional application observability to help engineers collect metrics of their software performance, while others do address data observability but with a focus on one or two specific layers, such as “quality” or “infrastructure.” Acceldata says it differentiates through covering a full gamut of layers across data infrastructure, quality, pipelines, and users. This, it says, supports more use-cases, including “spend intelligence,” which allows its customers to manage and predict their data processing costs, as well as giving them insights on data reliability — so-called “bad data” can cost companies a lot money in computing costs.

Prior to now, Acceldata had raised around $46 million, and with another $50 million in the bank, Choudhary said the fresh cash injection will help the company double down spread the good word around why data observability should be top-of-agenda for data-driven companies.

“Because the data industry is very broad, there is continuing confusion around terms like data observability, creating a need for education around its ‘what and why,’ and the benefit to enterprises,” Choudhary said. “With this funding, Acceldata will also further awareness for the industry through thought leadership, market education, as well as expanding and innovating products and services to better serve evolving customer needs.”

Choudhary added that it plans to bolster its existing headcount by 100 through 2023, taking its total number of employees to around 270 — further evidence, perhaps, that data-focused software companies are well-positioned to weather the current economic headwinds.

“Even in the current economic environment, investment in data continues to grow and our platform addresses the ongoing challenges experienced by data practitioners,” Choudhary noted.

Acceldata’s Seres C round of funding was led by March Capital, with participation from Insight Partners, Industry Ventures and Sanabil Investments.