- Toro, a modern data quality monitoring solution built by former members of Uber’s data platform team, announced it raised $4 million in seed funding co-led by Costanoa Ventures and Point72 Ventures
Toro, a modern data quality monitoring solution built by former members of Uber’s data platform team, announced it raised $4 million in seed funding co-led by Costanoa Ventures and Point72 Ventures with several other investors, including former Head of Data at Uber Jai Ranganathan and head of machine learning platform for Uber’s self-driving arm Yu Guo.
Even though data has been driving more decision-making than ever before, reliability is still a major challenge for data teams. And data quality has polled as the number one pain point among data professionals. Plus data scientists spend half of their time on data cleaning and prep.
Toro co-founders Kyle Kirwan and Egor Gryaznov worked together on building internal tools for Uber’s data team. And the growth of the business led to the creation of custom tools for a wide range of functions from dashboards and A/B testing to data catalogs and outage detection.
“We learned a lot about what teams needed to know about their data to break out of the reactive mode many of them are in. It’s why Toro focuses on automating outage and anomaly detection for complex data models,” said Kyle Kirwan, co-founder and CEO of Toro.
Providing reliable data enables teams to preempt dashboard and reporting issues — which is crucial to companies getting accurate data on where and how to adjust operating assumptions in today’s rapidly evolving economic environment. Toro also provides an easy user interface ready for product managers, analysts or engineers along with automatic recommendations and flexibility to define custom logic. Plus it offers the ability to look for anomalies within specific slices of data and explainable alerts to improve the speed of debugging.
Early users of Toro have reported cutting the time spent setting up monitoring by as much as 40% and detecting issues less than one hour after installation. And Toro plans to use the funding to accelerate product development and bring the product to a larger audience.
“Despite its importance, data quality has remained a challenge for many enterprise companies,” added Casey Aylward, Vice President at Costanoa Ventures. “Kyle and Egor’s deep experience building several of Uber’s internal data tools makes them uniquely qualified to build the best solution.”
