Manta nabs $13 million to simplify data lineage management

Data lineage automation platform Manta today closed a $13 million series A1 round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Manta says it will put the funds toward workforce growth and product development as it looks to expand into new territories.

Data lineage, which includes the data’s origin, what happens to it, and where it moves over time, offers improved visibility and makes it easier to trace errors back to the root cause. But practices commonly vary from company to company, with just 20% of organizations publishing data provenance and data lineage, according to O’Reilly.

One explanation for this inconsistent adoption might be the challenge of successfully capturing data lineage. A best practice is to incorporate mechanisms for generating and managing metadata into front- and back-end tools, which takes substantial time and effort. To address this, Manta’s suite offers actionable intelligence to support development, ostensibly shortening time to market while boosting governance efforts and ensuring both quality and security.

Manta serves as a central hub for data flowing within an organization. The platform’s scanners connect with various parts of an environment, automatically gathering metadata to reconstruct a complete lineage. Lineages can be managed using Manta’s visualization app, and searches can unearth specific elements. Users can also compare a lineage with previous versions and share it with others in an organization.

Customers can import their own metadata from other sources to Manta and compare the state of an environment or data flows at any point in time. CEO Tomas Kratky says these capabilities go beyond augmenting an organization’s data management to give users in-depth visibility into the state of their development environments. Manta has improved the productivity of data teams at companies like Teradata and Comcast by 30% to 40% while simplifying system migrations, according to Kratky.

“Manual approaches to repetitive tasks have always been one of the key pain points of data management. Organizations in every corner of the world are struggling with this problem, and so did I before Manta came to life,” Kratky told VentureBeat via email. “Lineage is the missing piece of the data management puzzle, with the power to dramatically improve its level of automation. The substantial type of representation of metadata and dependencies (often hidden) between organizations’ data assets allows users to truly understand and programmatically control their environment.”

The funding round announced this week included participation from SAP.iO fund, German VC fund Senovo, and Czech VC fund Credo Ventures, in addition to Bessemer. The round brings Manta’s total raised to over $17 million.