Observability startup Pantomath lands $14M to automate data pipelines

Cincinnati, Ohio-based Pantomath, a data observability and traceability platform, today announced it raised $14 million in a Series A round led by Sierra Ventures with participation from Bowery Capital and Epic Ventures.

The new capital will be put toward expanding Pantomath’s platform and workforce, according to founder and CEO Somesh Saxena, with a focus on hiring across the engineering, product, customer success, marketing and sales divisions.

“Organizations continuously strive to be more data-driven, building reports, analytics and data pipelines across the modern data stack,” Saxena said. “Unfortunately, most struggle with data reliability issues, leading to poor business decisions and lack of trust in data as an organization — directly impacting their bottom line. Resolving complex data issues is a manual and time-consuming process involving multiple teams all relying on tribal knowledge to manually reverse engineer complex data pipelines across different platforms to identify root-cause and understand the impact.”

He’s not wrong. According to a recent Censuswide survey, 45% of data leaders have experienced data pipeline failure as many as 25 times over the past two years, mainly due to data quality or errors that were discovered too late. Of those 45%, 63% said that their customers’ experience suffered from the failures.

Saxena founded Pantomath in March 2022, after leading various big data and analytics efforts within GE Aerospace. In Pantomath, he hoped to build a data pipeline observability and traceability platform that could automate aspects of data operations while improving reliability.

Today, Pantomath provides a way for organizations to detect data quality issues through alerts, troubleshoot with logs and autonomous impact analyses, and identify the root cause of — and resolve — issues.

That might sound a lot like the host of other data observability platforms on the market. See Observe, for example, which recently raised $50 million in debt; Y Combinator-backed Metaplane; Acceldata; and Manta, which last year secured $35 million to grow its workforce and data observability tooling.

But Saxena insists that Pantomath is different.

“Other data observability solutions only focus on data quality, monitoring issues like data volume and data freshness within datasets,” he said. “Pantomath on the other hand, continuously monitors both jobs and datasets in real-time that make up a data pipeline across different data platforms, all with the context of the data pipelines those jobs and data sets are a part of, so users know exactly what’s broken, where it’s broken and why it’s broken.”

To what extent that’s true, it’s not totally clear to this reporter. But, for what it’s worth, Pantomath seems to be winning over both investors and customers — at least the way Saxena tells it.

“We have [ten] customers ranging from small-and-medium-sized and mid-market companies to large enterprises and Fortune 500s,” he said. Some of Pantomath’s more notable clients include Paycor, Lendly and G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers. “Additionally, Pantomath currently has a waiting list with several Fortune 500s on it given the high demand the company is facing.”

It likely helps that investors are bullish on observability. In the span of one week last year, three companies in the data observability sector raised over $400 million. And the observability market is forecast to reach $2 billion by 2026, climbing from $278 million in 2022, according to 650 Group.

Pantomath hasn’t quite reached those storied heights — it’s raised a total of $18 million in venture capital so far. But every startup has to start somewhere.