cinchy, a startup that provides a data management service for enterprise clients, today announced it has raised $14.5 million in Series B funding led by Forgepoint Capital with participation from IVP, SUV, Techstar and Mars. Bringing the company’s total amount raised to $24 million, the capital will be spent on scaling Cinchy’s reach and continuing to invest in the startup’s core technology, CEO Dan DeMers told londonbusinessblog.com in an interview.
“Data management remains an expensive task, and a proliferation of apps that produce an ever-increasing amount of data only adds to the challenge. As a result, data is not only a business driver or a competitive advantage, but is often a drain on IT budgets and a nightmare for compliance teams,” said DeMers. “The Cinchy platform addresses many of the challenges associated with today’s IT environments, especially those defined by data silos, data copies, and complex code.”
DeMers co-founded Jaswal Cinchy with Karanjot in 2017 with the ambitious goal of abstracting data integration processes. DeMers was previously the director of prime finance and futures technology at Citi, where he built and managed a technical delivery and brokerage support services group. Jaswal also worked at Citi in the data warehouse team on risk and margin.
Both DeMers and Jasawal noticed that companies struggled to overcome data integration hurdles. To their point, in a recent IBM questionnaire40% of IT leaders said their data integrations are becoming too expensive, while 19% believe their current data integration solutions cannot handle all data sources.
“The existing app- and API-centric architecture requires individual apps to manage their own data, meaning each new app or API adds another data silo,” said DeMers. “It’s like a tax on innovation that only gets worse with each new solution that comes along.”
Cinchy aims to solve this by enabling organizations to decouple data from apps and other silos by connecting them to a “network-based” platform. Project teams first connect data from core systems, software-as-a-service apps, and spreadsheets to the platform — Cinchy does things like data backup, data version control, and data engagement tracking without actually hosting the data. Admins can access the platform to view, edit, or request data for individuals and teams. Other users with appropriate permissions can use the data to build data models.
Image Credits: cinchy
Cinchy herself uses the platform to run her business. Employees have self-service access to discover, query, create and modify data, DeMers says. Data changes are version-controlled, access-controlled, and available to apps and users based on granular controls.
“Anyone who has experienced the collaboration and efficiency of collaboration tools like Google Drive and Docs understands the importance of adding these capabilities to organizational data,” said DeMers. “The results in terms of speed, efficiency, control and creative problem solving are astonishing.”
DeMers sees Cinchy competing with any vendor that promises to simplify data integration. There are quite a few, including Equalum, Airbyte, Hevo Data, and Jitsu – all of them chase after a market that could be worth $22.28 billion by 2027. The demand for data integration solutions certainly seems high, with a 2020 questionnaire of Dresner Advisory Services found that 67% of enterprises relied on data integration to support analytics and business intelligence platforms and 24% planned to do so in the next 12 months.
But DeMers argues that most focus on workarounds to better deal with data fragmentation, especially in the context of analytics. “In fact, most of the products believed to compete with Cinchy only add to the agility and compliance challenges associated with data integration,” he said.
Rivals will undoubtedly disagree. However, it is true that Cinchy has a growing customer base, particularly in the financial sector, indicating that it is gaining business. Adopters include institutions such as TD Bank, National Bank, and Natixis; Cinchy recently launched a credit union edition of the platform to better serve financial institutions.
“Organizations everywhere are looking for ways to save money while seizing market opportunities with new solutions. Therefore, we are confident that the Cinchy platform will increasingly rely on chief experience officers and team leaders charged with bridging these priorities,” said DeMers. “Cinchy… enables organizations to free their data from applications, spreadsheets and other silos and [available] for real-time collaboration where and when it is needed.”
Toronto-based Cinchy currently employs just over 50 employees.