On EQT Ventures’ investment in Sifflet, building the data team’s best friend

We at EQT Ventures are thrilled to back the Series A of Sifflet, a data observability start-up we believe will become the next category-leading tech company coming out of Europe.

Founded by the brilliant team of Salma Bakouk, Wajdi Fathallah and Wissem Fathallah, Sifflet has set out to build the data team’s best friend: an end-to-end data observability tool that gives data teams the ability to spend time analyzing data instead of troubleshooting and firefighting.

Unreliable data is not a new problem, but it’s getting more complex

Analyzing data to support decision making is a well known method, probably used in some capacity since homosapiens started to problem solve. On the flip side, the problem with bad data causing poor analysis and lack of trust in the result is equally old.

John Wanamaker famously said in the beginning of the 20th century:

“Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”

Fast forward a couple of years to modern data management and we’ve seen cloud computing enabling big data, which turned into lakes later organised in warehouses which morphed into the modern data stack.

The modern data stack has enabled high volumes of data from a wide range of sources to be processed daily, or even instantaneously (volume, variety, and velocity), and the output is readily available for the entire organisation to consume. However, with volume and complexity come data quality issues, resulting in lower reliability (veracity) and usefulness and at the end of the day creating high data entropy.

This results in data teams being forced to allocate more time to quality issues and troubleshooting. They become reluctant to add new sources or outputs, which in turn hampers the organisation on its journey to becoming data-driven, or as some say, data-led.

Creating order from the mess, unleashing full potential and reducing data entropy

The Sifflet team started out with a vision: unleash the potential of organisations by building a tool that helped their data teams monitor, detect, and identify the root cause and enable collaboration and redundancy with the vision to reduce the data entropy.

Today’s product is a full stack, end-to-end data observability tool that allows the user to create a full lineage across the modern data stack. In essence; the data team’s best friend. It allows them to constantly monitor, predict and resolve data errors so the team can spend time analysing, vizualising, and producing insights for the organisation.

Further and potentially even more important, it allows data teams to find and solve issues before they end up at a dashboard in a board deck, or affecting the performance of a service. This helps to build trust in the data which in turn enables a data-driven culture. Needless to say, having fast access to quality data will become (if it isn’t already) a necessity for future-proofing your business.

An A-team who’s lived the problem they’ve set out solve

Last but absolutely not least, this founding team — Salma, Wajdi and Wissem — is one of the most impressive I’ve ever met. Each brings their own skills and style yet they are totally aligned on vision and the type of company they want to build.

Having gathered experience across different industries in banking and global tech companies, they realized they all had the same problem: they did not have reliable data, which caused a significant mess and slowed things down.

Further, they are aligned in what type of company they want to build, how they want to build it and the values that are and will remain important.

One of the quotes that stuck with me during the process was Wajdi saying:

“ We want to build a company where people want to go to work on a rainy Monday morning in November”

This is such a great and sustainable mental vision to build a company from, which will hold true regardless of the phase and size of the company. I get the feeling that this is where I would want to work (should be said for the avoidance of doubt I love my colleagues) and this is part of why I have such high confidence in the team.

To summarize, we are super happy to join forces with the Sifflet team and looking forward to all hard the hard work in front of us, this journey is just getting started 👍🚀🇫🇷