Founded by Airbnb and LinkedIn Data Veterans, Acryl Data Re-Imagines Metadata Management With $9 Million in Seed Funding

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., June 23, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today Acryl Data, the metadata management company for the modern data stack, emerged from stealth with its next generation metadata platform and data catalog to enable comprehensive data management and data discovery.

“Enterprises are drowning in data. The next wave of successful data-driven businesses will be determined by who can rise above the deluge and create true value. Our mission at Acryl Data is to bring clarity to data through our delightful data discovery experience and a DataOps approach to data quality,” said Shirshanka Das, co-founder and CEO of Acryl Data.

Acryl Data was founded by Das and Swaroop Jagadish, CTO, to build the most reliable and trusted enterprise data graph. Before Acryl Data, Das served as the lead architect for the Big Data team at LinkedIn where he founded two popular open source projects - DataHub and Apache Gobblin - to meet the increasingly challenging demands of data discovery, management and operations. Today DataHub is used at well-known brands like Expedia, LinkedIn and Saxo Bank, and the project has more than 3,100 GitHub stars and more than 100 contributors.

Jagadish was the head of Data and Search Infrastructure at Airbnb where he built the foundation for making the company data-driven. Under his leadership, the data team built products like Airbnb Dataportal, a data discovery application tool which has thousands of weekly active users, in order to solve similar problems that Das solved at LinkedIn but with a different cloud-native technology stack.

Acryl Data’s platform is an extension of DataHub and is enterprise-ready and cloud-native. Acryl Data’s first product built on top of the platform is a developer-friendly data catalog that applies design learnings from Dataportal.

DataHub is a metadata platform built for the modern data stack that enriches daily workflows through trustworthy data and helps the central data team scale effectively. Its industry-leading streaming architecture powered by Apache Kafka allows for easy integration, creating a common metadata substrate across disparate tools in the ecosystem. Acryl Data will continue to drive DataHub forward in collaboration with LinkedIn, an investor in Acryl Data, and the broader open source community.

Igor Perisic, Chief Data Officer at LinkedIn, said: “LinkedIn’s unique view of the global economy provides us with the opportunity to improve economic outcomes for hundreds of millions of people around the world through data-driven insights and AI-powered products. To discover the right data, navigate the tens of thousands of derived datasets that our researchers and engineers use every day and manage them well, we rely on DataHub. We are excited to partner with Acryl Data to continue to advance DataHub with them.”

Swaroop Jagadish, co-founder and CTO of Acryl Data, said: “The modern data stack is fragmented and its tools lack the ability to interoperate with each other. I saw first-hand at Airbnb how a common metadata substrate can unify and allow value from data to be maximized. Acryl Data’s technology is based on a novel approach for harnessing metadata to unlock new capabilities in data ecosystems. With a streaming metadata platform that extends DataHub, our customers can create data management capabilities that far surpass anything the industry has to offer.”

Acryl Data’s platform, currently in private beta, is highly scalable and stream-based which ensures that companies can produce high quality data by instantly triggering automated policy-based actions on metadata changes. Its API-first design ensures that companies can implement DataOps practices in their data architectures which allows for safe, reproducible evolutions of their analytics and AI artifacts.

Graham Stirling, Head of Data Platforms at Saxo Bank, said: “We have on-boarded our key data products onto Acryl Data’s platform, and our data professionals are actively using it as our one stop shop for data discovery, data quality and federated governance following DataOps and Data Mesh principles. We look forward to transforming Saxo Bank’s data architecture through a strong collaboration with Acryl Data.”

Acryl Data’s data catalog is an enterprise-ready SaaS product, also in private beta, that data professionals can use to easily search and explore their entire multi-cloud data ecosystem to uncover hidden insights and build data products quickly.

Acryl Data Raises $9 Million from 8VC, LinkedIn and Insight Partners
Today Acryl Data also announced that it has raised $9 million in seed funding led by 8VC. LinkedIn and Insight Partners also participated.

8VC Partner and CTO Bhaskar Ghosh said: “Enabling high value and real-time business leverage of data is massively impacted by the fragmentation of the data ecosystem - across tech stacks, use cases and user personas. Acryl Data’s mission is to overcome this fragmentation through their innovative metadata platform which is an extension of the battle-tested open source DataHub platform. This bold mission demands deep and imaginative builder leaders like Shirshanka, Swaroop and their team of founding engineers at Acryl Data.”

Insight Partners Managing Director George Mathew said: “The modern data stack needs a fundamental rethink in how metadata is managed. We believe a next-generation, real-time metadata platform is needed, and Acryl Data is the best team to lead this transformation based on their groundbreaking work with DataHub.”

About Acryl Data
Acryl Data’s vision is to empower data teams with extreme productivity, using trusted, compliant data through a next generation metadata platform. Acryl Data is backed by 8VC, LinkedIn and Insight Partners and is based in Mountain View, CA. For more information, simply visit https://acryldata.io or follow @AcrylData.

Media and Analyst Contact:
Amber Rowland
amber@therowlandagency.com
+1-650-814-4560

A photo accompanying this announcement is available