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| Image Credit: Castor

Paris-based Castor, which helps businesses make sense of their data stacks, has raised $23.5M in the form of Series A round. The funding led by Blossom Capital follows a $2.6M Seed round raised by the AI platform in November 2019.

The post-money valuation was not disclosed but the investment round comes on the heels of Castor signing the likes of Deliveroo, Canva, and Vestiaire Collective as customers. The Series A round saw participation from previous investor Frst and Florian Douetteau, angel investor and founder of Dataiku.

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Castor: what you need to know

One of the problems faced by companies trying to become AI-fuelled is finding and understanding the data. Castor aims to solve that for organisations with its platform that acts as a data catalogue and can be easily adopted across the whole organisation.

As former data scientists and engineers, Tristan Mayer, Xavier de Boisredon, Amaury Dumoulin, and Arnaud de Turckheim understand the frustration of not being able to identify the right data to work on. With this as a challenge, they started Castor in 2020 to solve the problem faced by data scientists, machine learning and software engineers around the world.

It is a known fact that companies are now sitting on a huge amount of data but struggling to make efficient use of it. However, to scale their use of data, companies also need proper data discovery tools. Castor not only provides the data discovery tools but also enables each employee in an organisation to search through all available data assets in the company to perform the right analysis.

As a collaborative, automated data discovery tool, Castor is helping companies incentivise data use across the organisation. It does this with the help of a web app that helps employees understand the context around the data and even helps with using the data to perform right analysis.

Castor is being used by companies to expedite the onboarding process, streamline data compliance projects, ease cloud migration, debug and perform impact analysis. One of the areas where Castor sets itself apart from other data catalogue tools is its user experience, which is designed to make data look collaborative and easy to analyse.

As companies scale, the amount of data at their disposal also grows exponentially and makes it difficult for data scientists to perform the right analysis. With its easy to use interface and collaborative nature, Castor is driving take-up rates for its customers.

“Every company needs to be able to efficiently use data to build their business. Too often that data is spread across multiple teams and hidden away in multiple databases and dashboards,” says Tristan Mayer, CEO and co-founder of Castor.

“Even when you’ve found the data, there’s rarely enough context available to determine how to use it or what it means. With Castor, a company’s data has never been so clear or so approachable,” he adds.

Castor, which uses a beaver’s tail as its logo, claims it can reach up to 75 per cent of the overall headcount of the company. It also claims that customers are finding the right data 20x faster, reducing duplicates by 3x, and seeing 24 per cent growth in new data users company-wide in the past 12 months.

Aleksander Djurkasaid, CIO at Vestiaire Collective, says, “We have been using Castor for a year now. I am impressed by the sharp focus and usability of Castor, especially given their progress in such a short time frame. When it comes to usage, we have seen rapid organic adoption among both the Data and Business users, exceeding our initial expectations. Impact and ROI are here.”

Investors

The Series A round is led by Blossom Capital, a London-based early-stage venture capital firm looking to invest in European founders who can bring their ideas to the global stage. Founded in 2018, the firm has invested in unicorns across the US and Europe.

“From the moment we met Tristan, Xavier, Amaury, Arnaud and the rest of the team we knew they had both the expertise and the drive to make Castor a huge success. The next generation of successful scale-ups will all need to make better use of their data and Castor is the most effective tool for that,” says Blossom partner Imran Ghory. “The efficacy of the product is borne out by the adoption rates company-wide among Castor’s customers and we can’t wait to introduce this product to other companies so that they can join the Castor revolution.”

Castor plans to use the new funding to develop its sales and marketing teams in the US. It also intends to use the funding to further develop the AI capabilities of its platform. With 40 per cent month-on-month growth in its US customer base, the startup has found a partner with a proven track record of investment and growth in the US to scale its operations.