Crux Informatics Inc. wants to help big companies wrangle their data into something a little easier to digest. Today, it emerged from stealth mode and announced that it has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by financial giant Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The San Francisco-based company calls itself a “data engineering concierge service,” allowing businesses to extract value from their unstructured data quickly and efficiently. Rather than doing the data analysis itself, which is generally left up to specialized artificial intelligence programs, Crux instead extracts and organizes companies’ data to make it more digestible. The company specializes in financial data for banks, hedge funds, financial firms and so on, which is what drew Goldman Sachs to the startup.

“The emergence of unstructured data as an important input into the investment process creates a great opportunity for financial institutions, but only if actionable insights can be extrapolated from it,” Darren Cohen, global head of Goldman Sachs’ Principal Strategic Investments group, said in a statement. “Crux’s innovative approach — coupled with their deep expertise in financial services and capital markets — brings economies of scale that will allow companies to be more agile, inventive and effective with data.”

Crux Chief Executive Philip Brittan noted that the process of gathering information about the world, doing analysis, and driving unique insight is filled with a lot of pain points. “We take on the burdensome and non-differentiating aspects of our customers’ information supply chains, so they can focus on what really matters for their business,” he said, adding that the company strives to “make data delightful.”

The company offers three primary services: its informatics platform, its data engineering concierge service and its supplier network. The informatics platform includes toolsets for creating data pipelines, as well as built-in metrics and application programming interfaces that connect to outside services. Meanwhile, Crux’s concierge service helps onboard new data sources, cleans outliers and inconsistencies, and normalizes data to meet customers’ specific needs.

Crux’s supplier network combines data from multiple sources, allowing companies to evaluate additional datasets and acquire them directly from data suppliers. The startup was quick to note that it does not share or sell any of its customers’ data.

Photo: Crux Informatics