AI data reliability startup Soda Data raises $14M – SiliconANGLE

The artificial intelligence-powered data quality startup Soda Data NV said today it has closed on a new $14 million funding round, despite claiming it has already achieved financial self-sufficiency over the past 12 months.

Today’s round was led by existing investors and strategic partners Singular and Point Nine. It comes around three-and-a-half years after the company last secured financial backing through an additional $14 million funding round in February 2021.

Netherlands-based Soda says the latest round comes at a time when the demand for what it calls “trusted data” is stronger than ever, with the rising popularity of artificial intelligence meaning that every company is scrambling to get its hands on as much information as they can to train AI models.

Soda is answering this demand with what it calls a “practical, low-friction approach” that enables everyone to work with reliable and high-quality data. Its flagship offering is a suite of data quality tools known as “SodaGPT.” It combines generative AI’s natural language processing skills with the domain-specific language capabilities of Soda Checks Language or SodaCL to translate user’s queries into simple tests for data quality.

Soda Chief Executive Maarten Masschelein told SiliconANGLE in an interview last year that SodaGPT is the first generative AI-powered tool of its kind for data quality. He said it “enables users of all backgrounds, technical or not, to take a no-code approach to naturally express and define data quality expectations.”

By democratizing data quality testing in this way, Soda says it’s helping to shift data quality management left to nontechnical staff, who can then help data scientist teams to identify reliability issues much earlier in AI development lifecycles. It helps to reduce the workload on data science and data engineering teams, who often find themselves overwhelmed with data management tasks.

Building on SodaGPT, Soda Data last year debuted a platform called Soda Core, which is an open-source framework that makes it simpler to embed reliability checks into data pipelines. By leveraging SodaCL, Soda Core makes it easy for teams to build data pipelines and maintain their quality by implementing data checks-as-code, in order to scale the reliability process for every kind of data workload, be it data ingestion, data transformation or data consumption.

Soda reckons it has made good progress since launching those innovations last year, reaching profitability and nurturing a global community of users that include the Walt Disney Co., Grocery Delivery E-Services USA Inc., which does business as HelloFresh, Bloomberg L.P and Abercrombie & Fitch Co. In a recent update, it pioneered the idea of “data contracts,” which make it possible for data teams to manage data quality as an application programming interface, similar to how software engineers maintain software quality via APIs.

The company says it’s now primed to accelerate its presence across North America, and plans to use the money from today’s round to expand its global teams, including its go-to-market operations. On the operational side, it said it will focus on integrating AI more tightly into the workflow of data engineers, automating testing and observability for the data layer.

Masschelein said the company’s growth has been driven by its unwavering vision to democratize data quality. “This additional funding support will give us the strongest possible platform to capitalize on the huge investment in AI, which has highlighted the critical value of data quality,” he said.

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