{"id":102397,"date":"2024-06-05T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-05T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/05\/with-21-8m-in-funding-tobiko-aims-to-build-a-modern-data-platform-techcrunch\/"},"modified":"2024-06-05T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2024-06-05T12:00:00","slug":"with-21-8m-in-funding-tobiko-aims-to-build-a-modern-data-platform-techcrunch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/05\/with-21-8m-in-funding-tobiko-aims-to-build-a-modern-data-platform-techcrunch\/","title":{"rendered":"With $21.8M in funding, Tobiko aims to build a modern data platform | TechCrunch"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Data transformation startup Tobiko<\/a> may not be a household name yet, but you may have seen co-founder and CEO Tyson Mao<\/a> on \u201cBeauty and the Geek\u201d back in the aughts and his co-founder, brother and CTO Toby Mao<\/a>, on the speedcubing circuit. (Both have held world records in the past, and Tyson co-founded the World Cube Association.) Since then, the brothers, together with their co-founder Iaroslav Zeigerman<\/a> worked at wide variety of companies, ranging from Apple to Airbnb, Google and Netflix, where Tyson and Zeigerman first met.<\/p>\n

Now, with Tobiko, they aim to reimagine how teams work with data by offering a dbt-compatible<\/a> data transformation platform, with the popular SQLMesh<\/a> and SQLGlot<\/a> open-source projects at its core and an intuitive low-code user interface to build data pipelines and transformations.<\/p>\n

The company on Tuesday is launching its cloud platform and announcing a total of $21.8 million in funding, split between a $4.5 million seed round and a $17.3 million Series A round led by Theory Ventures. 20Sales, Fivetran CEO George Fraser, Census CEO Boris Jabes, and MotherDuck CEO Jordan Tigani also invested in the company.<\/p>\n

While at Airbnb, Toby led the company\u2019s Minerva project<\/a>, the company\u2019s internal metrics semantic layer. While working on that, though, he says he realized that the real power of Minerva wasn\u2019t the semantics but its data transformation capabilities.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe steps from getting from raw data to actual business value \u2014 there\u2019s a lot of stuff going on there,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot of hard work. And so we wanted to eventually build a semantics company, but first we want to solve transformation. And so at Airbnb, I got a demo of the industry standard tools, dbt, and that gave me the inspiration to start this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Image Credits:<\/strong> Tobiko<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Toby acknowledged the popularity and functionality of dbt, which has become somewhat of an industry standard for building. But he argued that it\u2019s not the right solution for every company. \u201cDBT was really designed to accelerate Series A companies\u2019 data stacks,\u201d he said. \u201cWe wanted to make a data platform, a data transformation tool, that could work at any company, even FAANG-style. So we took our experience, our collective knowledge, and built a system that would scale with both large amounts of data and large amounts of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Zeigerman explained, at the core of this modern platform is SQLMesh, an open-source tool that allows developers to build data pipelines with built-in tools for data transformation, testing and collaboration. This is also where the team\u2019s background in semantics comes in. \u201cSQLMesh understands SQL, as opposed to treating it as a piece of text,\u201d he explained. And that understanding comes from SQLGlot, which Toby created during his time at Airbnb. \u201cThis ability to understand SQL unlocks a bunch of things that significantly boost the speed of developing and engineering productivity.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Image Credits:<\/strong> Tobiko<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This tool enabled Tobiko to do syntax checking on SQL queries, for example, before they are sent to the database. It also categorizes and tracks all of the changes that engineers make in the development process and tell them whether their break anything in relation to other datasets and transformations in the system.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe truly believe that this is going to be one of the first observability tools that not only understands that something broke, but why it broke, because we understand your code, we understand every version of every code you\u2019ve ever written, and we can tie every failure to that change,\u201d Tyson said.<\/p>\n

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Image Credits:<\/strong> Tobiko<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Tobiko also offers businesses the ability to create what the team calls \u201cvirtual data environments\u201d that developers can use during the development phase and then reuse for other projects (or even in production). <\/p>\n

The team tells me that it is mostly targeting data engineering teams right now and that it is working with customers of all sizes, including some unicorn startups. A lot of them are bringing entirely new applications to the service, but since it is compatible with dbt, there are also a number of dbt users who have made the switch. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Data transformation startup Tobiko may not be a household name yet, but you may have seen co-founder and CEO Tyson Mao on \u201cBeauty and the Geek\u201d back in the aughts and his co-founder, brother and CTO Toby Mao, on the speedcubing circuit. (Both have held world records in the past, and Tyson co-founded the World […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":102398,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-102397","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102397\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}