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We are excited to announce that Cybersyn has closed a $62.9M Series A funding round led by Snowflake with participation from Coatue and Sequoia Capital. Snowflake executives Mike Scarpelli and Christian Kleinerman and Coatue co-founder Thomas Laffont all joined our board.
Cybersyn is a data-as-a-service (DaaS) company, focused on making the world’s economic data available to governments and businesses. Cybersyn aspires to combine public and proprietary data to create derived products useful for market intelligence, investment, and policy decisions. Many organizations have embraced data science internally, but could benefit tremendously from incorporating third-party data into their decision-making process. This funding round will allow us to hire the team and acquire the data to make this aspiration a reality.
Today, proprietary datasets are complex, opaque, and slow if you know where to buy them. The datasets are often arbitrarily priced and require significant engineering effort to manage. At the same time, governments publish reams of data – but it’s slow and every agency has a different format. Simultaneously, the events of the last few years have shown the critical role data plays in monitoring our economy: real-time data on the pandemic, inflation, or consumer spending may very well make the difference between business success or failure.
At Coatue, I started and led a team to apply external (alternative) data to the investing process. In practice, this meant finding proprietary data sets to source, diligence, and add value to investments. Coatue developed a reputation for using alternative data to navigate markets and I developed an appreciation for how much commerce can be understood if painstakingly modeled with hard-to-find data. While there, I also had the opportunity to participate in Coatue’s bet on Snowflake: as a customer and an investor.
Cybersyn is the combination of those two experiences: mixing the experience developed using external data at Coatue with the technology brought by Snowflake. 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. This presents a clear opportunity to remove a major technical barrier in sharing data and enables Cybersyn to focus on what we do best: finding and transforming proprietary content into commercially relevant datasets. We are starting with content that measures where consumers are spending money and time.
Cybersyn is also a bet on people. There is a lack of analysts bridging the gap between technical skill sets and commercial applications of data. A lot of data sits on shelves because the minds with the problems to solve are not the minds that can query it. Bridging that gap: going from raw data to usable data is a core focus. We are growing our team in New York and looking for commercial, pragmatic engineers, and researchers interested in building the “Simcity for the real world”
We are grateful to the teams at Snowflake, Sequoia, and Coatue for their support. As a former Coatue partner, it is particularly meaningful to have the firm’s support once again from a different vantage point. We look forward to learning from Sequoia and Snowflake’s best-in-class operators.
Cybersyn’s products are available today on the Snowflake Marketplace, beginning with free, public-domain data. Data is sourced from the public domain, government agencies, and open data organizations and is shared for free, with the added benefit of standardization. Our proprietary data, focused on where consumers are spending money and time, will be available soon.
Alex
Founder & CEO