We are happy to announce that Bowery Capital recently led a seed round of funding in Select Star, an intelligent data discovery platform that helps corporate teams understand their data - where it lives, how it’s structured, and how it’s used. To hear directly from Select Star’s founder and CEO, Shinji Kim, you can take a look at a Medium post she wrote about Select Star and the future of data catalogs. We have laid out some more information about the round and our investment rationale below.
Who?
We first met Shinji through our events platform which has been a driving force for deal flow. Around 2014, we hosted a SaaS dinner with our friends at OpenView Venture Partners that Shinji attended via an introduction from Leng Lee (previously at Codecademy). Shinji is an experienced entrepreneur in the BI and big data space. Prior to Select Star, she founded Concord Systems, a real-time distributed stream processing framework, which was acquired by Akamai in 2016 and subsequently launched Akimai’s IoT Edge Connect Beta. Prior to these ventures, she was involved in growth and product at Yieldmo, Facebook, and Sun Labs. We believe Shinji is at the forefront of data discovery platforms and possesses the necessary industry knowledge to disrupt antiquated data cataloging and management.
What?
Select Star created a SaaS platform that solves the data discovery challenge faced by businesses today. The platform fosters tighter alignment between corporations’ data and corporate teams by providing both users with the full context of datasets and metrics. Through Select Star, companies can expose operational metadata, track the provenance of data, and guide their data usage. Today, companies are tasked with incorporating years worth of cluttered data across many different sources, creating time and workflow inefficiencies. We believe Select Star is the type of solution needed to shift data catalogs toward fully centralized platforms.
Why?
Select Star is well-positioned to become the standard for data catalogs. Currently, the majority of data teams are unable to build internal data discovery platforms due to resource restraints. Additionally, incumbent enterprise data catalogs are expensive and manual documentation requires continual maintenance. Select Star solves these problems for businesses by providing an affordable pricing model and offering end-to-end solutions that integrate data context (e.g., popularity and lineage) and maintains the platform’s infrastructure. In their initial launch, Select Star has brought on multiple large beta customers and is continuing to grow quickly. In our work looking at the data management sector, it is clear to us that Select Star fulfills a necessary niche in the market. Select Star is actively onboarding data teams onto their platform and if you are interested in using Select Star for your team, do not hesitate to reach out to us.
Where?
Select Star is based in San Francisco, CA.
