Hurt's data.world Wins $50m to Fuel Rapid Growth

Data discovery, governance and insights firm data.world, the latest venture of Bazaarvoice co-founder Brett Hurt, has announced $50m in Series C financing, and says it will expand product offerings, add talent and open new markets.

Based in Austin, Texas, the Certified B corporation offers a knowledge graph-based data catalog which maps siloed, distributed data to familiar and consistent business concepts, allowing 'everyone - not just the 'data people' - to get clear, accurate, fast answers to any business question'. The firm works for clients in banking, insurance, high-tech, healthcare and the public sector and including Penguin Random House UK, Verisk Analytics, WPP and the Associated Press. It is also home to the 'world's largest' collaborative open data community with more than 1.6 million members.

Funding was led by the Growth Equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management, and supported by a number of other VC firms and angel investors. The company's total raised to date is $132.3m. Mike Reilly, a VP in the Growth Equity business within Goldman Sachs, has joined the data.world Board of Directors.

Hurt (pictured) co-founded Bazaarvoice and as CEO led it through an IPO and major acquisitions; and founded and led Coremetrics - acquired by IBM in 2010 for around $300m. He comments: 'Leaders understand the importance of extracting key insights from their data to drive their business or organization, but they have struggled to put in place the necessary infrastructure to do so broadly across their departments and teams. We look forward to collaborating with our partners, including Goldman Sachs, to dramatically expand our product offerings, open new markets, and provide companies with solutions that drive data literacy, access, and usability all powered by our knowledge graph. We are quickly becoming the most deployed data tool within our customers and will continue to evolve our data catalog platform into the front office for data and analytics work'.

Web site: www.data.world .