Castor raises $24M to make data discovery as simple as Google Search

New York-headquartered Castor, a data catalog provider for enterprises, today announced it has raised $23.5 million in a series A round of funding led by Blossom.

Modern-day organizations are all about data. They leverage platforms like Snowflake to gather as much information as possible and produce insights to make crucial business decisions. However, as the volume of this data grows and more sources join the pipeline, it becomes difficult for enterprise analysts to identify the right datasets to work on. They struggle to determine which datasets would be more suitable for the project at hand, leading to the creation of the same kind of dashboards – even if the requirement is different. 

Moreover, the access controls and silos set up for data security do not leave a clear standard for analysis, hampering the operations of data teams across different departments.

Castor ensures seamless discovery, usage

Castor’s offering solves these challenges by providing enterprise users with tools to collect, discover, understand and use datasets according to business needs. The solution automatically documents datasets and provides an overview of the entire data environment, giving employees the ability to search through all available data assets in the company.

Once the users identify the required datasets, the Castor web app helps them understand the context around it and how to use it. Its use cases range from expediting the onboarding process and streamlining data compliance projects to easing cloud migration and performing impact analysis.

“Castor can be connected to our customers’ data stack in 30 minutes. We have built deep connectors to most data warehouses (Snowflake, Redshift, Bigquery, etc.), data transformation (debt, etc.) and data visualization tools (Looker, Tableau, Metabase, etc.). We extract all the relevant context needed to trust the data, then we leverage algorithms to add additional intelligence and information to guide users through the usage of their data,” Xavier De Boisredon, cofounder at Castor, told Venturebeat.

User-friendly

While data catalogs have been around for a while, including well-funded players such as Alation, Collibra, Data.World and Atlan, Castor claims to differentiate based on the user experience it offers. The company says traditional data catalogs are clunky and difficult to maintain, whereas its product strives to make working with data easy, friendly and collaborative. It offers a Google-like search engine that enables anyone, regardless of their data literacy level or department, to find, understand and trust data.

“From a product perspective, Castor’s difference relies on a Notion-like UX that enables company-wide viral adoption and leverages a lot of automation to bring painlessly context and data together. Meanwhile, from a GTM perspective, Castor’s land and expand pricing model and 15 minutes onboarding experience makes it easy to get started,” De Boisredon said.

Road ahead

With this round, which takes the company’s total fund-raise to $25 million, Castor will focus on expanding its sales and marketing teams and strengthening its platform’s AI capabilities.

On the product side, the company will also work toward building a reverse metadata engine, new collaboration and gamification features and capabilities to improve the entire data environment health, the cofounder added.

According to Research and Markets, the global market for data catalogs is likely to grow from $344.5 million in 2020 to $1.1 billion by 2026.