Data startup Cybersyn emerges from stealth with $62.9 million in Series A funding led by Snowflake

Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) startup Cybersyn emerged from stealth today with a $62.9M Series A round led by Snowflake and including participation from Coatue and Sequoia Capital. The New York-based Cybersyn was founded by Alex Izydorczyk, who was the former head of data science at Coatue.

Cybersyn will use the fresh capital infusion to grow its eight-person team and acquire more proprietary data to create derived products that are useful for market intelligence, investment, and policy decisions.

In conjunction with the funding, Cybersyn also announced that Mike Scarpelli, Chief Financial Officer of Snowflake, Christian Kleinerman, Senior Vice President of Product at Snowflake, and Thomas Laffont, Co-founder and Senior Managing Director of Coatue, have all joined its board of directors.

Izydorczk, who brings a wealth of knowledge as the former head of data science at the investment firm Coatue, started Cybersyn in 2022 to make the world’s economic data transparent to governments, businesses, and entrepreneurs and enable a new generation of decision-makers.

Cybersyn founder and CEO Alex Izydorczyk

The investment by Snowflake marks the first time the company has led a startup funding round, as the cloud-data warehousing giant looks to expand its data marketplace for enterprise users to acquire live and ready-to-use datasets.

“We’re not trying to just be a data broker. We’re trying to actually add value to the data we acquire and combine it,” Izydorczyk said. Unlike the current data brokers on the market, Cybersyn aims to sell augmented economic datasets to investors, governments, and other corporate clients.

Snowflake Marketplace currently allows users to access third-party data and pay for specific datasets, and combine it with their own corporate data using its platform. The company now has more than 1,800 dataset listings.

“Cybersyn is a company that was built for this era of data sharing and moving with agility. We think of the marketplace as a core part of our offering. If someone is willing to be strategically aligned with us, we’re happy to invest,” said Christian Kleinerman, senior vice president of products at Snowflake.

With terabytes of information generated every day, there are so many available datasets that could potentially determine the success or failure of businesses, yet they are largely inaccessible in their current form. The proprietary datasets of today are intricate, opaque, static, and hard to locate. They are frequently priced without justification and necessitate considerable engineering work to handle. Likewise, governments release vast amounts of data, but they do so slowly and in outdated formats used by agencies.

Cybersyn solves those challenges by combining the world’s public and proprietary economic data to create commercially relevant datasets that are useful for decision-makers across businesses and governments.

“Cybersyn is an investment in people,” said Alex Izydorczyk, CEO & founder of Cybersyn. “There is a wealth of data that goes unused because the individuals with the technical expertise to analyze it are often not the same individuals who have the business acumen to apply it effectively. We’re focused on bridging that gap.”

“Cybersyn is on a mission to revolutionize market intelligence and is well positioned to tackle this challenge with its data science expertise,” Kleinerman said. “At Snowflake, we believe in the power of data to transform business outcomes. Our partnership with Cybersyn will enable us to deliver even more valuable content to our customers on Snowflake Marketplace.”

Meanwhile, Cybersyn said its proprietary and publicly available datasets are currently on Snowflake Marketplace. The company also plans to release additional proprietary datasets soon.

“Our digital economy generates massive amounts of data, but we are only leveraging a fraction of this data to improve decision-making,” Laffont said. “As someone who has seen Alex’s ability to synthesize complex data firsthand, I believe he understands this untapped resource well and has a compelling vision for harnessing it. I’m confident that under his leadership, Cybersyn has the power and potential to deliver a paradigm shift in the way we operationalize the world’s data.”

“Between inflation and market uncertainty, understanding the economy in real-time is a competitive advantage that cannot be achieved with internal data alone,” said Mike Vernal, Partner at Sequoia Capital. “Cybersyn’s unique combination of public and proprietary datasets will enable companies and government agencies to make decisions faster and with more precise information.”