Marc Andreessen famously proclaimed in 2011 that “software is eating the world”. Fast forward to today and it’s data eating the world. Data is growing somewhat faster or much faster than other types of data in 71% of enterprises according to Western Digital. By 2025, there will be 175 zettabytes (10,000 TB) of data. Solidatus is a metadata management and data lineage platform that’s focused on how enterprises view, manage, and understand their growing mounds of data. The company focuses on letting its customers harness the data economy, whether it’s for compliance, governance, introducing efficiencies, or even digital transformation efforts. Solidatus is currently used in a variety of industries including pharmaceuticals, banking, aerospace, manufacturing, consulting, and telecommunications. In 2020 alone, the company was able to quadruple its revenue as the pandemic introduced new complexities for data management across location and geography.
London TechWatch caught up with Cofounder Philip Miller to learn more about the company, its future plans, and recent round of funding.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Solidatus raised £14m ($19.2m+) in Series A funding to transform how organisations view, understand, and manage data. AlbionVC led the round, which also includes HSBC Ventures and Citi, who are also two of Solidatus’ global enterprise clients. The deal was led by Emil Gigov and Jay Wilson of AlbionVC, with Wilson joining the Solidatus’ Board of Directors following the investment.
Tell us about your product or service.
Solidatus facilitates both data lineage and business process engineering, by managing the relationship between Data, People and Processes. Whether to demonstrate regulatory compliance, improve governance, assist with transformational change or reduce inefficiencies in data handling, it is uniquely engineered to build end-to-end data models more efficiently and effectively and improve an organisation’s data economy – in some cases improving efficiencies by up to 90%. It allows the rapid capture, storage and visual representation of data/governance lineage, together with its supporting metadata. Its meta-model is easily understood by users from both technical and business backgrounds.
Its simple, intuitive, and flexible cloud-based application allows organisations to rapidly discover, visualise and understand how data flows through their systems.
Combined with its intuitive visual interface, Solidatus is a tool that can be used by anyone who needs to understand, record or represent data lineage and metadata, without the need for lengthy training and support. With our platform it is now possible for a company to have a centrally-coordinated, distributed, and universally available single source of metadata knowledge, which eliminates confusion over terminology.
What inspired the start of Solidatus?
Both myself and Philip Dutton worked previously within large, complex financial organisations, and experienced firsthand the issues which existing data management procedures and practices had been failing to solve. Once you’ve experienced firsthand a consistent pattern of data management problems, you have a greater insight into what is required to fix them – and how important it is that they are fixed – and so together we founded Solidatus in 2011. Entirely self-funded until very recently, Solidatus came to market in 2017 with a data lineage solution that was built from the ground up to be accessible to a wide range of business users, enabling organisations to map their data processes in a straightforward and visually-led manner and identify any pinch points or potential compliance risks.
How is it different?
Solidatus is unique in the way it enables an organisation to quickly build a corporate map of their business and data relationships. It has been shown to offer up to 90% efficiency savings over traditional methods and solutions. Essentially it provides the only viable low-touch solution to complex data problems. We deliver the leading self-service data capability management solution that radically speeds up new data projects by cutting discovery time, reduces risks and costs, and streamlines regulation implementation.
Solidatus represents next-gen visualised data lineage and metadata management. Traditional data governance products use tabular structures, with visualisation capabilities bolted on, preventing an intuitive understanding of the data. Uniquely, in Solidatus, the visualisation is also the metadata store, containing the meaning and the origin of the data. A user always gets a full understanding of a Solidatus model, because its metadata is right there in the model, not hidden away in a table somewhere else in the software.
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
At Solidatus, we are passionate about revolutionising the data economy. Our primary focus is on shifting the data management paradigm towards sustainability and helping businesses become proactive rather than reactive when it comes to the management of their data. The ever-increasing demand for openness, transparency, and traceability needed in business today is what led us to develop the solution.
Whether used to demonstrate regulatory compliance or to improve governance and control, Solidatus supports transformational change by enabling organisations to facilitate growth, reduce costs and effectively manage risk. This is a particular issue in international financial services given the growing international regulations in this space, but it also impacts any business which needs to navigate the waters of international data compliance, and has complex flows of data throughout its systems and locations. Data challenges like these are increasingly arising in anything from government to pharmaceutical to retail industries, all over the world.
What’s your business model?
Without giving away our secret sauce, we are selling and upselling….
How has COVID-19 impacted your business?
As the solution is cloud-based, and the business has been nimble since its inception, the biggest change has been switching to home working which we have managed with relative ease. We actually experienced our best year to date in 2020, growing in both revenue and staff numbers. The pandemic has actually sharpened the issues of data management for many businesses by adding in new layers of complexity, and the numbers of international regulations in place have only increased. We’ve been able to meet this need for new clients – our biggest challenge has been missing so many opportunities to bring the business together in person, which is the same for almost everyone.
What was the funding process like?
Unlike many businesses looking to raise their first official set of capital, we actually found ourselves in the situation of having almost too many suitors to get involved! We were in the very privileged position of being able to assess people who were coming to us looking to get involved, which meant we could be very careful about making sure our vision for the business matched theirs, and that we’d be likely to have a strong working relationship. We’re really fortunate with Albion that they are as excited about the potential for our business as we are, and alongside HSBC and Citi – who are also our customers, and have seen firsthand the difference our solution can make within their organisations – it seems we have a perfect first set of investors.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Managing the whole process via video link! The kind of relationship building and matching of like-minded people was important to us with our new partners, and that can be really hard to assess via Zoom. Usually, you’d get that kind of a feel for people in a meeting or over lunch.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Albion quickly appreciated the potential of how the solution simply makes the complicated task of mapping metadata management – and keeping an organisation updated to constantly changing legislative agendas – easy. They appreciated our roadmap for growing and developing the solution and came up with some ideas of their own. Metadata management may not seem the most exciting of topics, but it can have very real and very expensive consequences for businesses that don’t get it right.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We’re expanding overseas, especially within the United States and Asia, and are always looking at new ways we can develop our solution.
What advice can you offer companies in London that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Make sure you have good cash flow and do not over-extend until you can afford to. It is hard work and you will need to be on top of how to stretch what resources you have including having deep personal pockets!
Make sure you have good cash flow and do not over-extend until you can afford to. It is hard work and you will need to be on top of how to stretch what resources you have including having deep personal pockets!
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
Opening in the US is massive for us, expanding in Asia and improving the reach of the product in new markets such as government and pharma.
What is your favourite restaurant in London?
For breakfast – Roast in Borough Market
For lunch – Lazio’s on Minories
For Supper and if I have cash Murano or to have a good steak at Smith and Wollenski’s next to Charing Cross
