Castor, a data cataloging platform, announced today that it has raised $23.5 million in a Blossom-led Series A funding round with participation from Frst and angel investors including Florian Douetteau, the founder of Dataiku. CEO and co-founder Tristan Mayer said the proceeds will be spent on expanding the company’s 25-strong workforce, with a particular emphasis on its marketing and sales departments.
Castor and other data catalogs are collections of metadata, data management, and search tools designed to help users find the data they need within an organization. Data catalogs also serve as inventories of available data and provide information to assess whether data is suitable for a particular application.
Mayer founded Castor in 2020 with Xavier de Boisredon, a former data scientist at Ubisoft. The two built data catalog software that they were initially tired of selling to the heads of data at Payfit and Qonto: Arnaud de Turckheim (Payfit) and Amaury Dumoulin (Qonto). But Qonto and Turckheim, seeing a greater opportunity, decided to quit their jobs and launch Castor with Boisredon and Mayer.
“We’re on a mission to help people find, understand, and use data,” Mayer told gotechbusiness.com in an email interview. “With increased automation, Castor makes it easier to bring together the context needed to understand data. We empower people to build a collaborative data culture.”
Castor provides data discovery tools designed to help users understand the context around data. Castor focuses on use cases such as streamlining data compliance and cloud migration projects and connects to cloud data warehouses including Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift and business intelligence tools such as Looker, Tableau and Metabase to automatically create and update documentation that employees can reference if they have. data related questions.
Castor’s data cataloging tools in action.
“Castor optimizes the performance, cost, compliance and security of a company’s data. A healthy infrastructure helps improve the data experience,” said Mayer. “From a product perspective, Castor’s difference is based on a Notion-like user experience that enables enterprise-wide viral adoption, lots of automation to painlessly bring context and data together. From a go-to-market perspective, Castor’s ‘land and expand’ pricing model and 15 minutes onboarding experience makes it easy to get started.”
Castor competes with startups such as Alation, Data.World and Collibra in the data catalog space. But the company has managed to land several major customers so far, including Deliveroo and Canva.
Certainly, the interest in data catalogs remains strong, but Castor still has a lot of work ahead of it when it comes to customer acquisition. According to in a 2021 Eckerson Group survey, while 94% of organizations plan to deploy a data catalog, only about a third of early adopters said their data catalog has met their expectations. The complexity of tools, a lack of user acceptance and poor integration with other systems and tools were cited as the main challenges.
“Castor has nearly 50 customers ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees,” Mayer said. “The platform makes a lot of sense for data and technical decision makers, as well as for C-suite level managers. Indeed, it is extremely difficult to achieve company-wide alignment with metrics as the company grows. Castor helps them have an overview of what is happening with regard to data in the company – across the board.”
The latest round of funding brings Castor’s total amount raised to $25 million.
