Tuning out the noise — why we invested in Onum
Picture an all-you-can-eat buffet. There is so much to choose from that it feels overwhelming. You fill your plate with everything in sight and start eating, only to quickly realise that you’re over-full yet unsatisfied. It would have been better — and cheaper — just to skip the buffet and order your favourite dish.
For a long time, companies have been forced to pay for all-you-can-eat data buffets, and it has been an expensive and miserable process. Now, Onum is offering to help enterprises find the delicacies in their data.
Onum is the brainchild of Pedro Castillo, previously the founder, CEO, and CTO of Devo, the cloud analytics and security platform valued at over $2bn. Today, every business has an ever-growing pool of data — more data is now generated in half a day than was created in an entire year back in the early noughties. At Devo, Pedro experienced being on the receiving end of this deluge. He saw first-hand the growing challenges his customers faced in understanding what data was where, what value it had, and where it went. The entrepreneur searched for a solution to the problem but found nothing that really cut through. So he decided to build one himself.
Pedro and his co-founders, Lucas Varela and Pedro Tortosa, launched Onum in Madrid in early 2023, and their company has already signed up household logos in banking, telecommunications and beyond as customers. Onum has gained traction so quickly because its observability pipeline platform allows companies to tune out the noise in their data, extracting new levels of value while simultaneously cutting costs. Several Onum customers saw the cost of managing their data cut by up to 80% within a matter of days of implementing the platform.
This might sound too good to be true, but it isn’t. When we first met Pedro at his home in Madrid last year, a 45-minute appointment turned into nearly two hours of non-stop conversation. We were struck by his ambition and the clear vision he and his co-founders shared: to give companies complete control over their data, and to equip them with better insights to deal with the next generation of infrastructure challenges and opportunities. We knew we had to invest in the business, so when Pedro invited us back to Madrid just two weeks later to attend their launch event, we jumped on the plane. After diving deeper into the company and meeting the rest of the brilliant Onum team we were only more convinced.
To avoid wasting precious resources and to future-proof their operations, companies need to effectively and efficiently tune out the noise in their data — which is why we are hugely excited to announce that we are leading a $28M Series A funding round for Onum.
Onum allows organisations to seamlessly separate the noise from the signal in their data. The company’s platform automatically helps identify what data is valuable to an organisation and therefore how it should be treated — ie: should it be discarded, archived, or immediately analysed. By doing all of this as close as possible to where the data is being generated, Onum allows even companies producing unimaginable amounts of data to harness real-time insights adding value to the data in transit as it routes the data to any destination, including any analytics or storage platform.
We are confident that Onum is the solution that can help businesses finally realise the enormous value of their data and stop wasting huge amounts of money on storage and sprawling infrastructure. And Pedro’s stellar track record and experience scaling Devo into a leading data/security player makes him the perfect person to build a global solution in this space.
We are thrilled to be leading Onum’s Series A, and to join our friends at Kibo Ventures and Insight Partners in supporting Pedro and the team as they scale. The founders have plans to expand across Europe and into the US in 2024, and major product developments are also in motion. Onum plans to add a marketplace of third-party apps to power shared data streams, community tools, and value-add modules.
The days of the disappointing data buffet are over, and the better-tasting future is here. Onum allows companies to isolate their useful data, future-proof their infrastructure, and save money. They are offering a world-class product at the right moment, and we cannot wait to see what Pedro and the team achieve.
If you’re a founder innovating in the data infrastructure space, please do get in touch at daniela@dawncapital.com and henry@dawncapital.com. We’d love to hear from you.
