Data observability startup Pantomath Inc. said today it closed on a $14 million Series A round of funding in September.

The round was led by Silicon Valley-based Sierra Ventures and saw participation from Pantomath’s early backers Bowery Capital and Epic Ventures. All told, the startup has now raised $18 million since launching just 16 months ago.

Pantomath’s platform gives companies an easy way to detect issues with bad-quality data. That’s important because organizations today are striving to be more data-driven and make strategic decisions based on information so it’s essential that the data they use is of high quality. But many organizations continue to struggle with bad-quality data.

This is what Pantomath is looking to change with its platform that warns companies of bad-data issues via alerts. It helps troubleshoot those issues with logs and autonomous impact analysis, highlighting the root cause and fixing them. As a result, Pantomath claims, it can help put more trust into the data organizations rely on.

Pantomath was founded by Somesh Saxena, a man who knows a thing or two about data quality. Prior to founding the startup, he led a data and analytics team at GE Aerospace, where he was tasked with supporting more than 18,000 data consumers within that organization. During his tenure there, Saxena says, he was responsible for numerous initiatives, including big data, enterprise data and analytics, self-service data and robotic process automation. As such, he has a lot of knowledge about the kinds of problems data teams come up with.

“Our AI-driven platform allows customers to detect data reliability issues through real-time alerts, troubleshoot them with end-to-end cross-platform technical lineage and aggregated logs, identify root-cause instantly, and resolve issues quickly with automated impact analysis,” Saxena said.

Armed with its Series A funding, Pantomath is looking to grow in what has already become a very competitive data observability industry. It will compete against several startups that have attracted far more money than it has, including Monte Carlo Inc., which was valued at a cool $1.6 billion after closing on a $135 million funding round last year. There are also Observe Inc., which recently raised $50 million, and Acceldata Inc., which nabbed $50 million back in February. Manta Software Inc. is another well-funded rival, while Metaplane and Revefi Inc. are competitors as well, despite raising less.

Given the amount of rivals it faces, Pantomath needs to offer something different. Saxena said the thing that sets it apart is its wider scope. He explained that those rival tools are only focused on data quality, monitoring things like volume and freshness.

Pantomath goes further, he said, continuously monitoring the entire data pipeline, including both the jobs and the datasets. That, he said, provides more context and allows Pantomath to quickly highlight the nature of any problem it discovers.

It’s an argument that seems to have helped Pantomath win some fans. The startup says it serves numerous enterprise customers, including Coterie Applications Inc., Paycor Inc. and Lendly LLC.

Paycor Chief Information Officer Rick Huff went on record to say his company chose Pantomath thanks to its ability to auto-discover data assets and visualize the relationships between them in real time. “Pantomath provides end-to-end traceability, which enables our teams to focus on building new solutions instead of getting mired down in operational tasks,” he said. “We believe Pantomath will enable significant productivity savings while ensuring our data is reliable and trustworthy.”

Pantomath said it plans to evolve its data observability tools further by innovating with artificial intelligence, while seeking to expand into new markets.

“We have been impressed with Pantomath’s ability to meet the needs of some of the most demanding F500 customers in a very short period of time,” said Sierra Ventures Managing Partner Mark Fernandes.

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