Gorkem Sevinc, a self-described “multi-time entrepreneur startup junkie,” kept running into the same problems trying to manage and understand crucial company data.
“Throughout my career, what I’ve experienced is that when you have bad data going into your ecosystem, you make bad decisions,” he told Hypepotamus. “When you have these data issues, your data team and your technical team are not the best people to catch those [problems]. It’s your subject matter experts – people like your CFO or your CRO – who know the data the best.”
It is easier for those subject matter experts to sniff out problems with the data than a technical team playing “whack a mole” trying to solve the problem, he added.
Keeping up with data quality changes has typically been a reactive process, Sevinc added. It’s also been hard for large enterprises to prove out ROI previously.
That’s exactly why Qualytics was created, said Sevinc.
The startup platform looks to help other companies “manage data quality at scale.” That means using AI to create better data quality rules and ultimately find the data anomalies that are hard to find when a company has millions or even billions of data points to work through.
Data anomalies might range from pricing discrepancies to missing timestamp data related to recent sales to more complicated problems around data accuracy. Qualytics builds upon a company’s historical data to ultimately create better, more flexible rules moving forward.
“When that data scientist is using 80 to 90% of their time prepping data and throwing bad data out, [they] are focusing on information and not insight. I want my team focused on insights,” he added.
Given Sevinc’s previous work scaling FinTech and HealthTech startups, Qualytics is currently pursuing enterprise clients in the financial services and healthcare spaces. The goal is to go after supply chain companies next, Sevinc added.
“[These industries] are highly regulated and we’re able to support their data privacy requirements,” he said.
New Funding From Atlanta Investors
While the company is headquartered in Orlando and Sevinc himself is located in Baltimore, Atlanta has played a key role in the early stages of Qualytics.
The team is part of the 10th cohort to graduate from the Engage program, a corporate venture platform designed to connect startups with enterprise companies. Sevinc said he was drawn to Engage because of the enterprise connections it provides to B2B companies.
“In this day and age, we’re not doing enterprise sales by just knocking on the door and saying, here’s my product, buy it,” Sevinc added. “That doesn’t work. What works is building a relationship. We start understanding what they’re looking for…we’re fast tracking getting our product in the hands of the buyer.”
Local VCs have also taken notice.
Qualytics closed a $2.5 million seed round on December 22, led by Tech Square Ventures. Atlanta-based Knoll Ventures and Engage also joined the round.
Qualytics will round out 2022 with a team of 10, with the plan of adding five to six more people to headcount over the course of next year.
“I think the fact that we have raised this funding round in this market speaks volumes to our team, our product and the problem space that we’re in,” he told Hypepotamus. “We are reducing the amount of time data engineers and data teams are spending managing their whole data quality ecosystem. We’re enabling them to do more value at work…we have our competitive advantage on how we’re working with enterprises and the way we approach our solutions.”
