Today, we are thrilled to announce that Select Star has successfully raised $15 million in Series A funding. This Series A funding round has been completed with Lightspeed Venture Partners with additional support from Bowery Capital, Sozo Ventures, and Pebblebed.
Our Mission
One of the key challenges organizations face today is the sheer volume of data they have to manage. Data is usually spread across different systems and silos, making it difficult to discover, understand, and trust. I’ve personally experienced this in organizations I’ve worked for in the past, including Facebook, Sun Microsystems, and Akamai Technologies.
The problem of organizing or cataloging enterprise data is not a new problem. The main part I’ve noticed in the market was that now with Modern Data Stack, you don’t need to be an enterprise business to have this problem. Regardless of the company size, many business departments are moving fast on making their data-driven decisions, and data is being democratized more than ever before.
Select Star addresses the challenge of “missing data context” by providing a single view of all data assets, including lineage, usage, and governance. This allows organizations to make better decisions, faster, and with greater confidence. Ultimately, our mission is to make data easy to find, understand, and use for any data consumer inside the organization.
Early Validation
Despite the uncertainty of the market and the beginning of data discovery and data observability, we have now seen notable customer successes after we launched our beta product and throughout 2022.
The successes include 100-year-old company Pitney Bowes implementing an enterprise data mesh architecture, to data integration unicorn Fivetran improving their data discoverability of massively growing data assets, and also saving hundreds of hours of on-call issues for the data team at Xometry.
More than just being a data tool, seeing the impact that Select Star can drive for each of our customers with data discovery, has made my team and I continue to pedal on our innovation.
What’s Next?
This investment round means the further manifestation of key benefits to our customers and partners; from working with customers more closely for their specific needs in data management, sharing best practices with our user community, and continuing to innovate Select Star’s product experience for both data teams and data consumers.
This past year we’ve released user-focused features including docs & metrics, auto-generated Entity-Relationship Diagrams, custom attributes, and auto-description and tag propagation that has defined Select Star to be more than just a modern data catalog.
In 2023, we’re looking forward to continuing to leverage our core functionalities including usage analysis and column-level lineage, supporting use cases of self-service analytics, data governance and cost management.
Looking Forward
Looking back, starting Select Star in March 2020 seemed like a risky move, amid the backdrop of a global pandemic and building a team without being able to meet or work with them in person. Looking back, it was a blessing, as now our fully-remote team is 26 strong and many of them we’ve been working together for more than a year across different time zones.
Without each team member’s dedication to making Select Star a quality product, working together as a team, and belief in the mission, we would not have made this much progress in such a short time.
We also could not have done this by ourselves. Our product has been iterated many times with testing and feedback from our early customer users, including Opendoor, Pitney Bowes, Handshake, Orfium, Anvyl, and Livesport.
Last but not least, Select Star would not have happened without our initial seed and angel investors who have believed in me as a founder, and in the potential impact we can have in organizations managing and utilizing their data.
It truly has been a blessing to work with our team, customers, and investors on this journey.
And moving forward, we’re excited to apply this new round of funding to the innovation and growth of Select Star, which means we’re actively hiring. We’re also continuing to partner with more customers looking to leverage data discovery in their organizations. Feel free to contact us if you’re interested in learning more.
