Snowplow raises $40 million to help companies ‘create’ data for AI and analytics

based in London Snowplow Analysiswith which companies can create behavioral data sets for AI and BI use cases, today announced it has raised $40 million in a Series B funding round.

Most organizations working on artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics projects tend to use data from existing systems such as Google Analytics and CRMs. These sources provide a lot of information to work with, but they are also disparate in nature, meaning the data they provide has different structures (think different field types) and different levels of granularity, quality, and completeness.

This makes it difficult for the organization to use the data as it is and adds the technically challenging and time-consuming element of data squabbling to the process – where teams have to work to clean, organize and transform the data in a standardized format for use. In addition, it also creates compliance issues as it is very difficult to track the data lineage of a collection of black-box SaaS applications.

Creating data with Snowplow

To solve the problem, Snowplow provides enterprises with a platform to generate structured behavioral data (describing customer behavior, the actions and decisions they take, and the context of those actions and decisions) that is tailored to specific AI and BI applications while remaining fully compliant.

“Generating behavioral data is about connecting events that a customer, machine or application can see over time. This allows for a very accurate and secure analysis of behavior, including compliance with European third-party privacy rules,” Alex Dean, Snowplow’s co-founder and CEO, told VentureBeat.

The platform delivers AI/BI-ready data directly to the data warehouse or house by the lake complete with a common schedule that can be used to train models, streamed for real-time applications, or augmented with third-party data and systems to meet future use cases. This means no more significant investments in finding, cleaning and preparing data for analysis.

Users handle every aspect of the platform through a dedicated console, including defining policies for creating, sharing and managing this data. According to the company, more than 10,000 companies, including Strava, CNN and Software.com, already use Snowplow to create data for various AI and analytics applications.

“Snowplow is unique in the way it solves the problem with informative, accurate data. Other companies create behavioral data (eg from web and mobile) but mostly to power their own applications on their own schedule. Examples include digital analytics solutions (e.g. Google Analytics) and CDPs (e.g. Segment, mParticle† However, unlike these solutions, the Snowplow technology aims to deliver the best AI and BI ready data directly into the data warehouse (or lakehouse) to power data applications in a universal data language – this is not an export of a dataset which is driven to do something else,” Dean added.

Plan ahead

With this funding round, led by global venture capital firm NEA, Snowplow will focus on growing its presence both in its home market and abroad. As part of this, the company plans to expand its team and provide support for its ever-expanding data types.

“There are some unique use cases in the industry that benefit from this kind of data approach… We will be making further announcements on the roadmap in the fall,” the CEO said.