Why we invested in Manta

Data lineage has become a core component of modern data architecture

Data observability solutions are becoming crucial for enterprises globally. Our investment in K2View – who provide a real-time data layer for operational and analytical workloads – was driven by our deep conviction in the ever-growing relevance of the space. Another key emerging trend is the need for dynamic data lineage capabilities, especially because of both the increased complexity of the enterprise stack and mission-criticality of data accuracy and transparency.

Even a minor change to a single field within a dataset can start a cascade of unpredicted events in a network, affecting critical business applications. Indeed, failure to maintain correct and up-to-date data lineage logs have resulted in major recent data incidents and significant regulatory penalties due to non-compliance. Moreover, there is more unquantifiable impact to a business’s decision-making if its leadership cannot put its full trust in its organisations become data-driven companies, the need for better understanding, observability and control of data pipelines will only intensify.

A missing piece of the modern data management stack

While IT teams are struggling to keep up with their organisation’s data map, the software aimed at helping manage it is far from optimal. Over the last decade, a range of new tools accelerated the modernisation of the data management stack, but these have largely focused on cataloguing and profiling data. Accurately tracking the flow of data dynamically has remained largely unsolved, leaving organisations no alternative other than mapping large parts of their data infrastructure manually. Automated data lineage in general – and Manta’s product in particular – solves this problem, with an end-to-end view of the data flow within the entire network. Performing this accurately and at scale is incredibly difficult, giving Manta a crucial advantage over other players in the market.

A Category Defining Product in a Multi-Billion $ Market

We strongly believe that Manta has built a unique and defensible product. The customers we have spoken to have consistently highlighted the superiority of its technology and the significant savings it has brought in terms of time, money, and resources. Not only is the technology superior to other solutions, Manta integrates directly with various parts of an organisation’s environment (databases, ETL tools, modelling tools, programming languages), automatically gathering all metadata and mapping the entire lineage. Positioned as a platform across multiple use cases, Manta has developed a one-of-a-kind solution, understanding the transformation logic of data on code level, whereas other approaches rely mostly on static metadata with a tendency to partial/inaccurate lineage. In the likely case that complexity in the enterprise stack continues to escalate, we believe data lineage will become a category by itself – with Manta being one of the defining players.

Visionary Founder Supported by a Team with Outstanding Technical Capabilities

When we met Tomas, Manta’s CEO and founder, it became quickly apparent that there was a great fit in terms of vision for the business. We share an ambition to build a best-in-class data lineage product to help enterprises understand their data environments. He has assembled a dream team of seasoned, yet passionate Enterprise SaaS operators to ensure the commercial success of the solutions built by an incredibly talented technical team. We feel very fortunate to work alongside Tomas and the Manta team and to be part of its journey, and are also proud to be working with existing and new investors Bessemer, Senovo, Credo, SAP.io, Dan Fougere, and EBRD.

If you would like to discuss Manta, DataOps or data observability in more detail or are an entrepreneur in the space, do reach out – we’d love to meet you.