YData, the Lisbon-based startup that created the first data preparation platform to accelerate the development of AI solutions, has successfully closed a seed funding round worth $2.72 million to fast-track its expansion across Europe and North America.
The funding round was led by Flying Fish Partners, a US fund that specialises in AI and whose partners are former Microsoft and Amazon Directors. The existing investors Faber, EDP Ventures and Real Ventures also participated in this round.
Founded in 2019, YData’s data preparation platform is currently probably the only product that brings together the major data science frameworks combined with proprietary tools for data access and profiling, data generation and labelling, to deliver better data quality for AI. Better data means fewer errors, biases and a representative set that ensures AI is built in a responsible manner. The technology of the young company has already been adopted by organisations in the financial services, utilities, and telecoms sectors.
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YData Co-founder and CEO Gonçalo Martins Ribeiro explained: “Typically, data scientists spend 80 per cent of their time just cleaning and preparing data, whilst 85 per cent of AI projects fail, mainly due to poor data quality. Our solution improves the quality of datasets, using state-of-the-art technology such as synthetic data generation, and helps data scientists build better datasets in a much easier and faster manner. Moreover, our Open-source community enables data scientists to contribute to the development of the technology and apply it to projects before committing to buying the platform.”
The fresh capital will enable the startup to step up its global expansion strategy, focusing on the United States, Canada, and the rest of Europe. As part of the next stage in the company’s growth, Ribeiro will move to the US to lead the expansion strategy, whilst the company’s development team will remain in Portugal. The strategy includes the growth of business development and product teams in the US and tech development teams in Portugal and across Europe.
Fabiana Clemente, co-founder and Chief Data Officer at YData, stated: “YData aims to help data science teams focus on what really matters, which is creating value for the company. The YData platform solves the problems at the data level that are always the most complex. In the coming years, any company that is investing in Artificial Intelligence will need to start with YData to assess and improve the quality of existing data, before training a machine learning model.”
Frank Chang, Managing Partner at Flying Fish Partners, commented: “I’m so excited to see YData tackling a very real problem that many companies will face, but don’t have the resources to solve internally. The amazing YData team and our first-hand experience with this major pain point is a huge reason why Flying Fish invested.”
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