Portuguese Data Start-up YData Raises Expansion Funds

Lisbon, Portugal-based data preparation platform YData has raised $2.7m (c.EUR 2.33m) in its Seed round of funding, which it will use to expand to the US, Canada, and the rest of Europe.

Founded in 2019 by data scientists Fabiana Clemente and Gonçalo Martins Ribeiro, YData offers proprietary tools to discover new data sources, synthesise data, and improve its quality. Through the firm's platform, data scientists can build datasets for their artificial intelligence (AI) projects and profiling. The firm is already working with organizations across the financial services, utilities, and telecoms sectors.

New funding has been led by Flying Fish Partners (a US fund that specializes in AI and whose partners are former Microsoft and Amazon Directors), with participation from existing investors Faber, EDP Ventures, and Real Ventures, and follows the company's initial EUR 500k pre-Seed round last March. With this new investment, co-founder and CEO Martins Ribeiro will move to the US to lead the firm's expansion strategy, while the company's development team will remain in Portugal. Funds will also be used to expand the Business Development and Product teams in the US and Tech Development teams in Portugal and across Europe.

Frank Chang, Managing Partner at Flying Fish Partners, comments: 'While at Microsoft, our key pain point when building AI systems was data. The team spent a huge amount of time, money, and data science resources on ensuring we had high-quality data and the right sets of data to build the models we needed. The company built its own internal system to handle this, and I'm so excited to see YData tackling a very real problem that many companies will face, but don't have the resources to solve internally.'

Web site: www.ydata.ai .