Data quality platform startup Bigeye Data Labs Inc. said today it’s aiming to help companies trust their data more after raising $17 million in a new funding round led by Sequoia Capital.

Previous investor Costanoa Ventures also participated in the Series A round for the company, formerly known as Toro, bringing its total amount raised to $21 million following a 2020 seed funding round.

Bigeye is on a mission to reinvent data quality by applying concepts proven in the areas of DevOps and site reliability engineering to datasets and data pipelines. It’s essentially a monitoring platform that works by instrumenting a company’s databases with data quality metrics that are powered by machine learning. The platform can create actionable alerts when it finds anomalies within a dataset, helping teams fix these problems before they can hurt the company’s business.

The company said fixing data is important because businesses need to weave the information they generate into all manner of products and services. So there’s an urgent need to ensure that data is accurate, the company said.

With so much data being generated these days, “human fail-safes” no longer exist, and operational issues such as missing, duplicated or damaged data cannot be detected manually. That’s where Bigeye’s data monitoring platform can help.

Following its earlier 2020 seed funding round, Bigeye co-founder and Chief Executive Kyle Kirwan told TechCrunch that the idea with the platform is to find problems in data content before that information weaves its way into dashboards and machine learning models where it could potentially do lots of damage.

Bigeye’s platform works by understanding what it’s looking for in each dataset and what the normal thresholds for a particular type of data are. If anything falls outside that threshold, an alert is triggered so the data team can dive in and fix the problem.

“Data quality is hands-down the biggest challenge most data teams face today, and they’re under enormous pressure to deliver high-quality data,” Kirwan said in a statement today. “But the tooling hasn’t caught up, demanding heroic levels of effort to keep things running smoothly.”

Bigeye’s data quality tools have already proven to be a hit at early adopters such as Instacart and Crux Informatics Inc., and the company will benefit from an expanded advisory board that includes names such as Datadog Inc. CEO Oliver Pomel, Jai Ranganathan, who previously led the data platform team at Uber Technologies Inc., and Ritesh Agrawal, who was in charge of infrastructural data science at Uber.

The company said today’s funds will be used to “improve the platform” and “make it available to more data teams.”

Image: Bigeye