Going global: Fast-growing Austin tech firm data.world looks to step into Europe

When a group of Austin tech veterans founded data.world in 2015, their goal was to build a social network where data scientists are able to connect and share collections of data.

Nearly six years and a lot of growth later, the company is ready to take its products global.

Thanks in part to a new $50 million funding round, data.world is looking to expand its customer base into Europe, and expects to double its employee team in the next 12 to 18 months, said CEO and co-founder Brett Hurt. To date, the company has raised $132.3 million in funding.

The cash infusion will "allow us to ramp up to a whole new level because we're going to significantly increase the engineering and product team to really ramp up that pace even more,” said Hurt, who previously founded five companies including Austin-based Bazaarvoice. “A big part of this round is we're going to accelerate our growth not just here in the U.S. but around the world.”

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Hurt said the company is especially targeting customers in Europe, as well as new verticals in the public sector such as state, county and federal customers, he added.   

The company’s data catalog allows customers to access, analyze and gain insights from data. It serves a range of business sectors including banking, insurance, high-tech, health care and the public sector. 

The company has grown to about 110 employees, with plans to nearly double that number over the next 12 to 18 months. 

Hurt said data.world has been developing new products at a rapid pace, with over 1,000 releases of the company's products in the past 12 months, but he expects the funding to help increase this pace as the company adds to its team. 

As part of the funding deal, Mike Reilly, a vice president in Goldman Sach's growth equity business for Goldman Sachs,  joined the data.world board of directors.

Reilly said data.world is at the intersection of several trends that are defining the future of data management.

“As data becomes the backbone of all businesses, data.world has created a UI purpose-built for both technical and business users ensuring that enterprises capture maximum value and adoption from their data investments," Reilly said. "Given their positioning and product differentiation, we believe that they are best-positioned to capture extensive market share in the evolving, high-growth data catalog space.”

The funding round comes during a busy week for the company, which is launching new features within its data catalog product and hosting a summit this week. 

“We've been growing by leaps and bounds,” Hurt said. “The pandemic turned out to be a very scary thing, but it turned out to be a really big accelerant for the business because now we're in the situation where not just data was siloed but the people were siloed.”  

Hurt said the pandemic has shifted data.world’s culture to embrace the hybrid work environment, which the CEO said has been one of the most important lessons he’s learned as an entrepreneur. 

“We realized we can be very efficient remote” Hurt said. “We still bring everybody in on a regular basis, at least once a quarter for our big all-hands from all over the country. But, we ultimately realize that there are absolutely amazing people that if you open the aperture of where you can hire, you can get that unicorn candidate that you're trying to find in Austin. It just might be in Bend, Oregon.”