Cybersyn is known as a DaaS (data-as-a-service) company that has a mission to make the world’s economic data transparent to governments, businesses, and entrepreneurs and enable a new generation of decision-makers. To learn more about the company, Pulse 2.0 interviewed Cybersyn founder and CEO Alex Izydorczyk.
Alex Izydorczyk’s Background
Izydorczyk spent more than seven years architecting and leading the data science team at Coatue, a multi-billion dollar investment manager where they applied external (alternative) data to the investing process.
“In practice, this meant finding proprietary datasets to source, and add value to investments. Coatue developed a reputation for using this data to navigate markets, and I developed an appreciation for how much commerce can be understood if painstakingly modeled with hard-to-find data,“ said Izydorczyk. “While there, I also had the opportunity to participate in Coatue’s bet on Snowflake, a leading cloud-based data platform as a customer and an investor, eventually leading to Cybersyn.”
Formation Of Cybersyn
How did the idea for Cybersyn come together?
“Cybersyn is the combination of my two experiences with Coatue and Snowflake: the ability to leverage external data on top of the most powerful, full-service technology. Christian Kleinerman and the team at Snowflake have extended the Snowflake product beyond just a data warehouse – it is a platform for apps, machine learning, and, of course, datasets. And all of our proprietary datasets now reside on the Snowflake Marketplace,” Izydorczyk shared. “There is a clear opportunity to remove a major technical barrier in sharing data, which enables Cybersyn to focus on what we do best: finding and transforming proprietary content into commercially relevant datasets.”
Challenges Faced
What are some of the challenges Izydorczyk faced in building the company and has the current macroeconomic climate had any effect on the company? “Cybersyn is fortunate to not be impacted by the macroeconomic environment. Our funding gives us a leg up, where we can hire the best talent while many companies are on hiring freezes, and we are well positioned to create new revenue streams for companies in a difficult environment,” Izydorczyk acknowledged.
Core Products
What are Cybersyn’s core products and features? “Cybersyn is a data-as-a-service company that’s focused on making the world’s economic data available to governments and businesses. We aspire to combine public and proprietary data to create derived products useful for market intelligence, investment, and policy decisions,” Izydorczyk replied. “We are starting with content that measures where consumers are spending time and money. Cybersyn already has a series of public data listings, available at no cost on the Snowflake Marketplace, focused on distributing government data on consumer spending, inflation, and interest rates in a consistent format. We most recently launched our eCommerce Benchmarks, focused on measuring ad spending and online sales by category. In the future, we expect to launch datasets focused on consumer spending in the U.S., with a particular focus on digital transactions at greater frequencies and granularity than publicly available datasets. These datasets will help investors, advertisers, and retailers measure their competitors.”
Evolution Of Cybersyn’s Technology
How has Cybersyn’s technology evolved since launching?
“We’re excited to be in the phase of developing and launching our first proprietary datasets. In March, we launched our first paid product, eCommerce benchmarking data, through Shopify,” Izydorczyk emphasized. “The Shopify Benchmarks data includes store category and subcategory level sales, website engagement, and advertising metrics. The data is made up of aggregated sales and web analytics for thousands of Shopify stores globally.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of Cybersyn’s most significant milestones? “We started Cybersyn in 2022, announced our first paid product in March 2023, and announced our series A funding of $62.9 million in April 2023,” Izydorczyk revealed. “We launched our first proprietary dataset with Shopify Benchmarks on the Snowflake Marketplace in April 2023.”
Funding
On April 12, 2023, the company announced that it raised $62.9 million in Series A funding and emerged from stealth, launching its data-as-a-service (DaaS) offering. The funding round was led by Data Cloud company Snowflake with participation from Coatue and Sequoia Capital.
“This funding round will allow us to grow our team and acquire more proprietary data to create derived products useful for market intelligence, investment, and policy decisions,” Izydorczyk pointed out.
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is Cybersyn pursuing? “Our datasets are created for those responsible for synthesizing external data for their companies–including heads of data analytics and market intelligence–particularly in financial services, retail, consumer packaged goods (CPG), and pharmaceuticals. While the size of this target market is not well-defined, we know the total revenue of our mature market competition is about $35.2 billion,” Izydorczyk analyzed.
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Cybersyn from its competition? “We offer faster, more granular data than competing DaaS solutions. Our data is provided in an analytics-ready, easy-to-use structure that is joinable with all our other free and paid products,” noted Izydorczyk.
Future Company Goals
What are some of Cybersyn’s future company goals? “Scaling our products, with our initial focus on data to show where consumers are spending money and time; and building out our team in New York, we are looking for commercial, pragmatic engineers, and researchers interested in pioneering the next generation of economic data,” Izydorczyk concluded.
