YData raises 2.7 million to accelerate US expansion
The funding round was led by US fund Flying Fish Partners and was joined by Portuguese venture capital firms Faber and EDP Ventures.
Portuguese startup YData has closed a $2.7 million (around €2.3 million) seed funding round in order to accelerate the expansion into the US and to grow its team by the end of the year.
The funding round was led by US fund Flying Fish Partners and was joined by Portuguese venture capital firms Faber and EDP Ventures, as well as business angels Steve Shwartz, Sergio Giacoletto and Carter Rabasa from 200 OK Ventures. The new round comes after, in March 2020, the startup raised €500,000 in pre-seed funding led by Faber.
Wells Fargo, EDP, Verbund or Telefónica are some of the startup’s clients that have created the first development platform focused on data, and that makes the process of “creating a training dataset much simpler, faster and cheaper,” says a press release.
The platform introduces a new technology – synthetic data – that promises to solve problems from privacy, data scarcity or even the lack of representativeness of classes. “In practice, YData provides several benefits, such as improved fraud and anomaly detection, simulation of pricing or network scenarios, improved credit risk modelling, data sharing and monetisation, among others.”
Arguments that convinced Flying Fish Partners – a North American fund specialised in AI and led by former AI directors at Microsoft and Amazon – to invest in the national startup.
“At Microsoft, our major difficulty when building AI systems was data. Teams were investing a lot of time, money and data science resources to ensure we had high-quality data and the right datasets to build the models we needed. The company built its own internal system to mitigate this problem and I’m proud to see YData tackling a very real problem that many companies will face but don’t have the internal resources to solve. Our experience with this difficulty combined with YData’s amazing team are the main reasons why Flying Fish invested,” said Frank Chang, managing partner of Flying Fish Partners, quoted in a press release.
“The investment raised in this round will allow YData to accelerate its global expansion strategy, with a focus on internationalisation to the United States and growth in this market, while maintaining the development team in Portugal,” it reports in a press release. Funding will also “enable the reinforcement of the team by the end of the year.”
The startup wants to double the team by the end of the year, raising the number of employees from the current 15 to 30.
(Article updated with correction of the amount in euros raised by the company)
