Data flow management platform Nexla nabs $12M

Nexla, a San Mateo, California-based collaborative data operations platform, today announced that it raised $12 million in series A funding led by Industry Ventures, with participation from Liberty Global Ventures, Blumberg Capital, Engineering Capital, Storm Ventures, Correlation Ventures, and angel investors. CEO Saket Saurabh says that the proceeds, which bring Nexla’s total raised to over $15.6 million, will be put toward product development and hiring efforts.

Enterprises face challenges on a range of data performance management issues, from filtering poor-quality data to keeping data flows operating effectively. For example, 87% of companies responding to a StreamSets survey say that bad data is flowing into their data stores, while just 12% consider themselves good at the core aspects of data management.

Founded in 2016, Nexla aims to streamline the process of getting data to more apps and users without requiring multiple development tools. The company’s platform integrates, transforms, delivers, and monitors data in a collaborative no-code and low-code way, leveraging a combination of “data fabric architecture” and metadata, according to Saurabh.

Above: Nexla’s data flow management dashboard.

Image Credit: Nexla

“The roots of Nexla started in 2009 when my team and I built Mobsmith, one of the first mobile ad servers,” Saurabh told VentureBeat via email. “We grew the idea to an over $200 million business, along the way getting acquired by Rubicon and going public in 2014. By then, the advertising industry was bursting with data, and we’d built a system to process more than 300 billion data records daily and applied it with machine learning to ad auctions. Knowing that the need for modern data processing was coming to many industries inspired us to start Nexla.”

Go with the flow

An MIT Technology Review and Databricks report found that just 13% of organizations are delivering on their data strategy, owing to issues around managing the end-to-end lifecycle. According to a recent survey by 2nd Watch, only 26% of enterprises have any data strategy at all, while 70% don’t have what they consider to be a mature data strategy.

Nexla aims to help by sitting between a customer’s data infrastructure and consumption layer, offering a stack that serves both analytical and operational apps with ready-to-use data. Users get web UIs, APIs, software development kits, and command line interfaces that enable them to create their own automated data flows.

“With Nexla, companies can migrate data from legacy, on-prem, and cloud systems to cloud data warehouses while feeding analytics dashboards with fresh data from hundreds of data sources in the enterprise,” Saurabh said. “The platform can also enrich customer support calls from customer relationship management data in real-time and rapidly onboard customers and partners by integrating with their apps and data stores. Moreover, Nexla can transform the format, schema, and shape of data; add validations and quality control checks to data flows; and automate data operations.”

Data teams at companies including Instacart, Poshmark, Freshworks, LiveRamp, Bed Bath & Beyond, and LinkedIn are using Nexla for data flow, data observability, and data transformation applications, according to Saurabh. Annual recurring revenue was $3.5 million this year, he says, and the company is cash-flow positive, with over 25 customers.

“Nexla is the only data platform in the market that learns from metadata to automate and unify data integration, transformation, delivery, and monitoring,” Saurabh continued. “The benefit of the platform … is that the data scientists, analysts, and frontline workers get ready-to-use data from anywhere without burdening data engineering teams.”

Thirty-employee Nexla competes with startups like Ascend and Prefect, which offers a platform that can build, run, and monitor up to millions of data workflows and pipelines. Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services also deliver data pipeline management and creation tools.