Masthead Data, the first data observability platform that relies only on logs and metadata, today announced it has raised $1.3M in pre-seed funding led by focal, with participation from SMOK Ventures, DEPO Ventures, Monochrome, and Alchemist Accelerator. Angel investors from Snowflake, ex-Uber employees, ex-Googlers, privacy and security professionals also participated in the round.
Software observability emphasizes log-centric monitoring of system performance, but current approaches to data observability rely on running SQL queries on the data, and therefore require at minimum read access to client data, while also contributing to compute costs. Masthead is the first observability platform that only needs to ingest log and metadata to see what is happening in the entire data warehouse to identify data anomalies and pipeline errors in real-time.
The Masthead approach provides two distinct advantages over what's available in the market today. First, it does not require access to client data, ensuring that their data remains untouched, private, and secure. Second, it does not contribute to a client's cloud computing costs. Masthead's approach cuts deployment time and effort dramatically, allowing clients to be up and running within minutes.
"One of the biggest fears of executives is using self-serve BI tools and having no way to verify the accuracy of their data," said Yuliia Tkachova, co-founder and CEO of Masthead Data. "Achieving data observability is a huge challenge for data engineering teams when they have thousands of tables in their warehouse and hundreds of Looker dashboards. Masthead proactively alerts data teams about data or pipeline issues so data engineers can prevent them from affecting business users."