INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
BackboneAI, an early-stage startup that wants to help companies dealing with lots of data, particularly coming from a variety of external
sources, announced a $4.7 million seed investment today.The round was led by Fika Ventures with participation from Boldstart Ventures,
Dynamo Ventures, GGV Capital, MetaProp, Spider VC and several other unnamed investors.Company founder Rob Bailey says he has spent a lot of
time in his career watching how data flows in organizations
number of scenarios from keeping large, complex data catalogues up-to-date to coordinating the intricate flow of construction materials
between companies or content rights management across an entertainment industry.Bailey says that he spent 18 months talking to companies
before he built the product
a number of problems related to this
For starters, it automates the acquisition of this data, usually from third parties like suppliers, customers, regulatory agencies and so
Then it handles ingestion of the data, and finally it takes care of a lot of actual processing from external sources, while mapping it to
internal systems like the company ERP system.As an example, he uses an industrial supply company that may deal with a million SKUs across a
couple of dozen divisions
Trying to track that with manual or even legacy systems is difficult
then finally present that data about those products to hundreds of thousands of customers
It spent 2019 incubating inside of Boldstart Ventures
Today the company has close to 20 employees in New York City, and it has signed its first Fortune 500 customer
Bailey says they have 15 additional Fortune 500 companies in the pipeline
With the seed money, he hopes to build on this initial success.
