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Soda monitors data and helps you fix issues before it’s too late
Meet Soda, a data monitoring platform that is going to help you discover issues with your data processing setup. This way, you can react as quickly as possible and make sure that you keep the full data picture.
If you’re building a digital-first company, you and your customers are likely generating a ton of data. And you may even be leveraging that data to adjust your product itself — think about hotel pricing, finding the right restaurant on a food delivery website, applying for a loan with a fintech company, etc. Those are data-heavy products.
“Companies build a data platform — as they call it — in one of the big three clouds [Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure]. They land their data in there and they make it available for analytics and more,” Soda co-founder and CEO Maarten Masschelein told me.
You can then tap into those data lakes or data warehouses to display analytics, visualize your data, monitor your services, etc. But what happens if there’s an issue in your data workflows?
It might take you a while to realize that there’s some missing data, or that you’re miscounting some stuff. For instance, Facebook miscalculated average video view times for several years. When you spot that issue, an important part of your business might be affected.
Soda wants to catch data issues as quickly as possible by monitoring your data automatically and at scale. “We sit further upstream, closer to the source of data,” Masschelein said.
When you set up Soda with your data platform, you instantly get some alerts. Soda tells you if there’s something off. For example, if your application generated only 6,000 records today while you usually generate 24,000 records in 24 hours, chances are there’s something wrong. Or if you usually get a new entry every minute and there hasn’t been an entry in 15 minutes, your data might not be fresh.
“But that only covers a small part of what is considered data issues. There’s more logic that you want to test and validate,” Masschelein said.
Soda lets you create rules to test and validate your data. Basically, think about test suite in software development. When you build a new version of your app, your code needs to pass several tests to make sure that nothing critical is going to break with the new version.
With Soda, you can check data immediately and get the result. If the test doesn’t pass, you can programmatically react — for instance, you can stop a process and quarantine data.
Today, the startup is also launching Soda Cloud. It’s a collaboration web application that gives you visibility in your data flows across the organization. This way, nontechnical people can easily browse metadata to see whether everything seems to be flowing correctly.
Basically, Soda customers use Soda SQL, a command-line tool that helps someone scan data, along with Soda Cloud, a web application to view Soda SQL results.
Beyond those products, Soda’s vision is that data is becoming an entire category in software products. Development teams now have a ton of dev tools available to automate testing, integration, deployment, versioning, etc. But there’s a lot of potential for tools specifically designed for data teams.
Soda has recently raised a $13.5 million Series A round (€11.5 million) led by Singular, a new Paris-based VC fund that I covered earlier this week. Soda’s seed investors Point Nine Capital, Hummingbird Ventures, DCF and various business angels also participated.
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Tokyo-based SODA, which runs Japan’s largest sneaker resell platform, lands $22 million led by SoftBank Ventures Asia
Tokyo-based SODA, which runs sneaker reselling platform SNKRDUNK, has raised a $22 million Series B led by SoftBank Ventures Asia. Investors also included basepartners, Colopl Next, THE GUILD and other strategic partners. Part of the funding will be used to expand into other Asian countries. Most of SNKRDUNK’s transactions are within Japan now, but it plans to become a cross-border marketplace.
Along with SODA’s $3 million Series A last year, this brings the startup’s total funding to $25 million.
While the COVID-19 pandemic was initially expected to put a damper on the sneaker resell market, C2C marketplaces have actually seen their business increase. For example, StockX, one of the biggest sneaker resell platforms in the world (which hit a valuation of $2.8 billion after its recent Series E), said May and June 2020 were its biggest months for sales ever.
SNKRDUNK’s sales also grew last year, and in December 2020, it recorded a 3,000% year-over-year increase in monthly gross merchandise value. Chief executive officer Yuta Uchiyama told TechCrunch this was because demand for sneakers remained high, while more people also started buying things online.
Launched in 2018, SNKRDUNK now has 2.5 million monthly users, which it says makes it the largest C2C sneaker marketplace in Japan. The Series B will allow it to speed up the pace of its international expansion, add more categories and expand its authentication facilities.
Like StockX and GOAT, SNKRDUNK’s user fees cover authentication holds before sneakers are sent to buyers. The company partners with FAKE BUSTERS, an authentication service based in Japan, to check sneakers before they are sent to buyers.
In addition to its marketplace, SNKRDUNK also runs a sneaker news site and an online community.
SODA plans to work with other companies in SoftBank Venture Asia’s portfolio that develop AI-based tech to help automate its operations, including logistics, payment, customer service and counterfeit inspection.
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