Prophecy raises Series A to Industrialize Data Refining
Prophecy is delighted to announce that we raised a $25M Series A led by Insight Partners, with participation from SignalFire, Dig Ventures & Berkeley SkyDeck. We're grateful to the team, the customers and the investors who have trusted us & helped us get started!
Prophecy came about when I saw at Hortonworks that most businesses trying to get value from data were struggling. With my compilers & developer tools expertise, (honed at Microsoft Visual Studio & at NVIDIA building CUDA) I could see that very sophisticated tools can be built by bringing deep systems expertise & coupling that with good design. These two communities - systems programming and visual design - rarely interact & magic can be created at the intersection. The key technical insight was that if we merge visual & code programming, then visual data users can be brought into the world of DevOps. We made git the source of truth - for visual workflows and metadata - and then built the entire product stack on top.
The fundamental problem is that data tooling hasn’t changed much over the past decade. Data is the new oil, but it needs to be refined into the fuel that powers machine learning and business analytics. This refining (or data engineering) is currently an artisanal process driven by data engineers and custom scripts. The data users continue to wrestle with data infrastructure instead of focusing on delivering business value from analytics and machine learning. Today, this refining of data is the realm of artisans trained in the craft of data engineering, who master many systems and program specialized recipes to produce data. There is little visibility or predictability to the process.
