In the race to adopt AI and gain a competitive advantage, enterprises are making significant investments. They invest hundreds of thousands of dollars (sometimes even billions) in high-performance models and use them to create applications capable of increasing the performance of various internal and external functions. Work is accelerating, but many teams are also beginning to notice that their investments are not paying off – applications do not provide the expected results and return on investment.
The fundamental problem is data. Most firms have difficulty organizing their data and unifying all the proprietary information they have. Enter CD data, a company solving this “integration” dilemma with a range of data access and connectivity solutions. Today, the startup announced that it has raised $350 million in development funding from Warburg Pincus and Accel to further speed up development, enabling engineers and business users to access and integrate data from any source or system.
“Access to data is the foundation of any artificial intelligence, machine learning or advanced analytics strategy, but for many organizations it still represents a difficult barrier to innovation. Given their extensive experience working with peer-to-peer firms, the partnership with Warburg Pincus and Accel will help CData thrive in its next phase of business, bringing cutting-edge solutions to market and supporting our clients’ modern data initiatives,” Amit Sharma said. co-founder and CEO of the company in a statement.
Previously, the company raised $160 million in multiple rounds from Updata Partners.
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What does CData offer?
Today, an enterprise technology stack is nothing greater than a network of complex systems and applications. From CRM systems to SaaS tools, they use every kind of platforms to maintain their business running. Some even have over 100 applications. This exponential growth in the number of systems has resulted in a massive increase in the volume of enterprise data. But the thing is that almost all of this information simply exists inside the enterprise. Due to the isolated nature of their source tools, they can not be combined and used as a whole (at least not without significant engineering effort). This ultimately impacts further AI and analytics projects.
Spinned out of /n Software in 2014, CData fills this gap with a connectivity platform that gives purpose-built connectors that solve each replication and live data access use cases.
“Customers benefit from the ability to leverage a common connectivity approach that supports both integration patterns – whether they need to physically move their data to a separate system such as a data warehouse, or query live data from another application without any data movement.” Sharma said in an interview with VentureBeat.
Using a replication approach, connectors synchronize data from various databases, applications, APIs, data warehouses, enterprise resource management and customer relationship management platforms and services. This enables isolated data to be combined to power AI and BI systems. Meanwhile, live connectivity enables direct access between systems, giving data teams and other industries the ability to consolidate evaluation and report data in real time.
Over the past ten years, the company has built a library of greater than 300 standards-based data connectors used by data and IT leaders in greater than 7,000 global organizations, including Office Depot, Holiday Inn, Tesco Bank and FedEx. Notably, a whole bunch of data management service providers and ISVs have also built CData connectors into their platforms to fulfill their customers’ data integration needs.
“As OEM customers, product leaders from major brands like Google, Salesforce, and Informatica turn to CData to meet customer requirements for enhanced connectivity, rather than spending development cycles trying to build and maintain integrations in-house. Embedding CData connectivity solutions provides immediate ROI by reducing time to market, reducing development costs, and delivering better customer experiences,” Sharma added.
The goal is to fulfill the growing demands for artificial intelligence
While CData has already established itself as a leader in the data integration space, growing over 40% yr over yr, the company is well aware that the job is far from over. As the burden of artificial intelligence increases at various levels, today’s enterprises need sophisticated integration tools greater than ever. CData desires to capitalize on this demand.
“We have started to see significant market decline driven by AI investment. As organizations try to meet new levels of demand for access to data to power their models, we are seeing an increasing demand for connectivity – especially in our OEM industry. Today, all modern software platforms are required to have a significant AI strategy and feature set, which requires a significant amount of data and the ability to effectively integrate and manage that data for AI initiatives,” said Sharma.
With growth capital from Warburg Pincus and Accel, which reportedly values CData at $800 million, the company will increase its investment in operations, go-to-market strategy and product development. This will hopefully help make existing and latest connectors available to more enterprises, simplifying the way information is connected for modern AI initiatives.
“As the AI market evolves, we will ensure the absolute best connectivity to the systems and applications our customers use in modern data use cases. Additionally, we are constantly evaluating where we can leverage advances in artificial intelligence to improve our products and deliver greater value to our customers,” Sharma noted, suggesting that the company will close the yr near $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
According to Priority studies, the global data integration market was valued at $13.6 billion in 2023 and is expected to register a compound annual growth rate of 12.32% over the next ten years to achieve $43.38 billion by 2033 dollars. The primary reason for this growth might be the increasing amount and diversity of data. Other significant players in this space competing with CData include HighTouch, Syncari, and Matillion.