Masthead helps data engineers map and better understand data pipelines within their cloud environments in order to detect anomalies, errors and inefficiencies in real-time
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.”
Masthead is currently available for Google Cloud, and will be rolling out to other providers in the coming months. The platform integrates with Looker so clients can see how data pipeline malfunctions impact downstream users and business operations. Installation is simple. Because it doesn’t directly access any proprietary data and the data never leaves the client environment, Masthead can be up and running in less than 15 minutes. Masthead is already being used by organizations in ecommerce, finance and a range of other technology domains.
“Before Masthead, the team would spend hours troubleshooting data problems,” said Joseph Arriola, Senior Data Manager at Yalo. “Masthead gives us a single pane of glass to see potential data anomalies. Everyone on the team can instantly see where a problem is coming from and how it’s affecting our work and our stakeholders.”
“Every business knows to unlock value from their data they must gain visibility over it first,” said Daniel Darling, Managing Partner at focal. “But handing their data over to a vendor triggers alarm bells around privacy and security. Masthead’s log-centric solution elegantly solves that conundrum by giving data teams the visibility they seek without ever touching the data itself; not to mention reducing their cloud computing bill in the process. It’s a true win-win.”
The company was founded in March 2022 by Ukrainians Yuliia Tkachova and Sergey Tkachov, both of whom have extensive technical backgrounds and hands-on experience in building data products. The idea for Masthead was born out of Yuliia’s frustrations with data reliability that she faced early on in her career as a product manager at a business intelligence startup. Customers often complained and were at risk of churning simply because they did not trust the data provided by the company’s product.
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