Data observability startup Metaplane, officially known as Quantifai Inc., said today in a blog post that it has closed on an $8.4 million seed funding round led by Khosla Venture.

Other participants included Y Combinator and Flybridge Capital Partners, as did Vercel Inc. Chief Executive Guillermo Rauch and HubSpot Inc. CEO Dharmesh Shah.

The startup was founded in 2020 by the MIT graduate Kevin Hu, the company’s CEO, former HubSpot engineer Peter Casinelli and ex-Appcues Inc. developer Guru Mahendran. Originally, Metaplane was designed as a customer success platform that analyzed companies data to prevent churn. However, after going through Y Combinator’s accelerator program, the team realized that its talents were better suited to developing data analytics tools, and the company pivoted.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Hu explained that a number of the customer success tools the company had developed couldn’t be used by its customers because of issues with the quality of their data. That prompted Metaplane to apply the learnings of software observability to data quality instead.

“Every day, executives are making decisions based on data that is incorrect,” Hu said. “Having more trust in data saves time and money for the executive, data team and company.”

Metaplane uses anomaly detection models trained on its customer’s historical metadata to monitor its customer’s data for any quality issues. These monitors take into account factors such as seasonality, feedback from customers and trends to try to reduce alert fatigue. The models employ a proprietary algorithm developed by Metaplane to understand the data it’s looking at, and make assumptions based on its historical knowledge of that information.

Going further, Metaplane also looks at data lineage, tracing the information from a data warehouse or data lake back to the systems where it was generated, such as Slack, PagerDuty, email clients and so on. In this way, it can alert stakeholders of data quality issues that arise from those systems.

Hu told TechCrunch that Metaplane wants to be the “Datadog for Data,” referencing the application monitoring firm that has become an essential tool for DevOps teams to assess the health of their apps and the compute infrastructure they run on.

“Data teams at high-growth companies use our observability platform to save engineering time and increase trust in data by understanding when things break, what went wrong, and how to fix it — before an executive messages them about a broken dashboard,” Hu explained.

However, Metaplane’s data observability tools go beyond simply warning customers of problems with their data. In a blog post announcing the seed funding round, Hu points out that although data quality is a problem, data observability is a technology that can be applied to additional problems.

To that end, some customers are now using Metaplace to help analyze company spending patterns and understand how data is being used within their organizations. Metaplane wants to cater to these users, and is planning to roll out “first-class support for gaining awareness into every piece of metadata,” Hu wrote.

Metaplane is gaining traction, with its platform now being used by more than 140 companies, including Imperfect Foods Inc., Appcues and Reforge Inc. Looking forward, Hu said the company will primarily use the cash from today’s funding round to invest in its product, with more platform integrations and discovery features.

Images: Metaplane