Setting up a stack of data tools is a difficult exercise for any startup to undertake, involving picking and choosing among a wide variety of tools and approaches. Mozart Data’s founders have a background in data wrangling and have built a platform of tools that makes the decisions for you, while leaving room for flexibility for more adventurous customers.
In some cases, Mozart has built the pieces into the stack, while in others it recommends what it considers best-in-class as it has done by selecting Snowflake as the default choice for a data lake on the Mozart platform of tools.
As company co-founder Peter Fishman told me, the idea is to have a data stack in a box of sorts that removes the complexity for startups that just want to get going quickly with a data platform.
“We want to be the easiest way for startups to get up and running on their data stack and data infrastructure,” he said. As Fishman explained to me at the time of the company’s seed round in 2020, this involves everything except data visualization.
“We do all of the parts before the BI tool. So we extract and load the data. We manage a data warehouse for you under the hood in Snowflake, and we provide a layer for you to do transformations,” he said.
He says they do it that way because they feel like customers know their data best, and they consider Mozart’s job as to get the data to a point where you can decide how to best present it.
The company emerged from the Y Combinator Summer 2020 cohort with three initial customers. That has grown to 50 customers, and the company reports that since raising its seed capital in 2020, ARR has grown a hefty 500%.
It has also gone from six employees in 2020 to more than 20 today, with even more people joining with new capital. He says that building a diverse company is critically important and he looks at the top of the funnel when they are screening candidates as the best way to make that happen.
He says that he has been thinking about DEI from the very start. “We talked about this literally, like 18 months ago, that the right time to start was when we were actually less than 10 people because otherwise you have this vicious cycle of you have a really non-diverse work group, and then it becomes increasingly difficult to change your company makeup,” he said.
The company announced today that it has raised a $15 million Series A led by Craft Ventures, with participation from Goldcrest Capital, Spearhead, Apollo Projects and Valor Equity Partners.
Brian Murray, partner and COO at lead investor Craft Ventures, says that they have been working with Mozart since its earliest days, and he says the fact that the founders have a data background and have experienced this issue makes them uniquely suited to help solve it.
“Data is a business’s most treasured asset. Collecting, organizing, storing and visualizing data is critically important, and yet it’s almost always an afterthought — you don’t know you need a data scientist until it’s too late. Mozart helps growing companies spin up a modern data stack in minutes, not months or years,” he said.