The Data-Driven Enterprise: Our Investment Thesis in Tecton
There is massive technological evolution underway in the enterprise today. Software has indeed eaten the world but data has emerged as this new world’s most valuable resource. Companies big and small are investing at record levels to collect, categorize, stream, integrate, analyze and act upon data. The amount of information available to the enterprise in this software-dominated world has surpassed any past expectations and the insights data provides are unlocking new opportunities. Nearly every enterprise we encounter wants to gain the most it can from this powerful often proprietary resource.
Many of today’s fastest-growing enterprise companies have data at their core. Snowflake has leveraged the power of the cloud to simplify access to the data warehouse and business analytics. MongoDB has given the world a more flexible and accessible database for creating data-driven applications. Databricks has empowered enterprises to efficiently batch query large amounts of data. Confluent has connected data across the enterprise and created the opportunity to act upon it in real time.
The next frontier for data is enabling enterprises to automate the process of learning from and then making decisions based upon it. To date, such experiments have been confined to data scientists and a small team of machine learning specialists. But those limits are about to explode.
Mike Del Balso, Jeremy Hermann and Kevin Stumpf were a team at Uber who saw the opportunity of transforming machine learning into an operational superpower. While at Uber, they built a service called Michelangelo which democratized access to machine learning capabilities across all of the company’s business units. Michelangelo empowered Uber teams to build machine learning into the operations of the business. Pricing, safety checks and fraud prevention are all examples of operations that were automated with decisions made in real time with the benefit of Michelangelo making data available to the right models at the right time.
This powerful trio recently decided to leave Uber and create software that democratizes access to machine learning across the enterprise. We are excited to announce our seed and Series A investment in their new venture, Tecton. Tecton’s data platform empowers business users to seamlessly integrate the right data to operationalize machine learning in their business. Just as Michelangelo became one of the most valuable services at Uber, we believe Tecton will be one of the most valuable partners to data-driven enterprises as they take advantage of the benefits of machine learning.
You can read more about this incredible team, their journey and the opportunity at Tecton here. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Mike, Jeremy and Kevin on this journey and look forward to seeing them make a dent in the universe.
