AI Tech Startup YData Secures $2.7 Million in Funding to Fast-Track International Expansion

YData  created the first data-centric development solution to combine data discovery, improvement, and scale in one unique environment

YData, the European tech startup that created the first data preparation platform to accelerate the development of AI solutions, has successfully closed a Seed funding round worth $2.7 million to fast-track its expansion across Europe and North America.

The funding round, which was led by Flying Fish Partners, a US fund that specializes in AI and whose partners are former Microsoft and Amazon Directors, also included the participation of existing investors Faber, EDP Ventures and Real Ventures.

Established in 2019, YData’s data preparation platform is the only product that brings together the major data science frameworks combined with proprietary tools for data access and profiling, data generation and labelling, to deliver better data quality for AI. Better data means fewer errors, biases and a representative set that ensures AI is built in a responsible manner. The company’s technology has already been adopted by organizations in the financial services, utilities, and telecoms sectors.

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“Typically, data scientists spend 80% of their time just cleaning and preparing data, whilst 85% of AI projects fail, mainly due to poor data quality,” explains co-founder and CEO Gonçalo Martins Ribeiro.

“Our solution improves the quality of datasets, using state-of-the-art technology such as synthetic data generation, and helps data scientists build better datasets in a much easier and faster manner. Moreover, our Open-source community enables data scientists to contribute to the development of the technology and apply it to projects before committing to buying the platform.”

The investment will enable the company to step up its global expansion strategy, focusing on the United States, Canada, and the rest of Europe. As part of the next stage in the company’s growth, Ribeiro will move to the US to lead the expansion strategy, whilst the company’s development team will remain in Portugal. The strategy includes the growth of business development and product teams in the US and tech development teams in Portugal and across Europe.

Fabiana Clemente, co-founder and Chief Data Officer at YData, explains that “YData aims to help data science teams focus on what really matters, which is creating value for the company,” and for this, the YData platform “solves the problems at the data level that are always the most complex.”

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“In the coming years, any company that is investing in Artificial Intelligence will need to start with YData to assess and improve the quality of existing data, before training a machine learning model,” she adds.

Frank Chang, Managing Partner at Flying Fish Partners spoke about his real-world experiences with the problem that YData solves: “While at Microsoft, our key pain point when building AI systems was data. The team spent a huge amount of time, money, and data science resources on ensuring we had high-quality data and the right sets of data to build the models we needed. The company built its own internal system to handle this, and I’m so excited to see YData tackling a very real problem that many companies will face, but don’t have the resources to solve internally. The amazing YData team and our first-hand experience with this major pain point is a huge reason why Flying Fish invested.”

The funding announced today comes after YData raised €500,000 in a pre-Seed investment in March last year led by Faber.

YData is an alumnus of some of the world’s most recognized startup programs, including the Google For Startups Residency; NVIDIA Inception Program; Techstars AI, and IBM Hyper Protect. The company has also been recognized by international publications as being among the most promising in the field of AI by a multitude of expert-led Data Science outlets.

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