NEPTUNE, THE DATA SCIENCE COLLABORATION HUB, HAS COMPLETED A POST-SEED FINANCING ROUND OF USD 3M
The Neptune Team, Photo Courtesy Of Neptune.ai
Neptune, the data science collaboration hub, has completed a post-seed financing round of USD 3M. The round is led by btov Partner’s Digital Tech Fund and Private Investor Network along with TDJ Pitango, Rheingau Founders and private angels, well-known data science experts including Marek Cygan, Grzegorz Świr- szcz and Mateusz Malinowski. Neptune had previously completed a USD 1.7M seed round back in September 2018.
While the data science market and demand for data science experts are growing exponentially, there is not yet a standard way of doing data science projects. Most teams use tools that were designed for software engineering, even though data science workflows are very different. The result is a lack of efficiency, transparency and high-quality results. According to Gartner, 85% of data science projects fail not least due to this lack of fit-for-purpose collaboration tools. The lack of transparency also leads to a high key person risk within the already stretched and highly competitive market for data scientists.
Neptune provides the most lightweight solution that allows data scientists to track the entire experimentation process, visualize and share results and insights. It works with both Python and R, integrates with all commonly used frameworks and tools like Keras, TensorFlow, Scikit Learn, Pytorch and can be used with any cloud or own infrastructure. No matter what kind of problems a data science team is working on and what kind of workflow they may have, Neptune fits all situations with optimal flexibility, providing the common space to store results and collaborate.
Piotr Niedźwiedź, CEO and Founder of Neptune started his entrepreneurial journey in 2011 after internships at Google and Facebook. Before Neptune he successfully co-founded 3 companies, including both a software and a data science consulting company.
As a software engineer, he was used to working with certain well established practices like code review, version control and agile methodologies, that were ensuring work efficiency and high quality of the end product. When he moved to the data science field, it felt like turning back in time to the early days of software development.
The data science field surprised him with its chaos. Everyone seemed to have their own methods of working and storing results, knowledge was scattered among many places. “As I was running my own business, I felt like I was losing valuable insights every day”, says Piotr Niedźwiedź, CEO & Founder of Neptune.
Knowing that data scientists across the globe are struggling with similar challenges of tracking and sharing their work results on a daily basis, the Neptune founding team set out to create a software solution that is available to everyone.
(more about Neptune’s story here:
The fresh capital will be used mainly for product development as Neptune’s ambitious goal is to be the best tool on the market for experiment management and collaboration in data science.
Piotr Niedźwiedź adds: “At this stage of the company’s development, we’re focusing on getting the product and value proposition right as we believe that data scientists are eager to get their hands on a tool that makes their daily life much easier. We want to give them the best user experience and set of features they need. This is what we are planning to focus on in the upcoming months.”
For btov, this is the first investment in Poland. Andreas Goeldi, partner of the btov Digital Tech Fund, explains: “Data science is one of the most dynamic markets in IT today and yet still immature in terms of its commonly used toolset. As a former CTO with responsibility for a data science team, I know how challenging it is to enable an efficient and transparent collaboration process in this field. Neptune has an outstanding team with incredibly deep knowledge of the market and the customer problem. The company is perfectly positioned to solve this fundamental problem and establish a global standard for data science collaboration.”
Piotr Niedźwiedź, CEO & Founder of Neptune, elaborates: “I truly believe that just like in soft- ware engineering, the data scientists community needs “dev-tools” that are infrastructure agnostic and lightweight. As a software engineer, I have always been a big fan of lightweight, specialised tools (like GitHub, PyCharm, Trello, to list a few) that I could use in any project, any company. Keeping that in mind, we built Neptune to become the data science community tool of choice for experiment management, but also professional teams, for collaboration.”
About Neptune
Neptune, founded in 2018 is a Warsaw based startup focusing on building a collaboration standard for data scientists. Neptune records your entire experimentation process. Exploratory notebooks, model training runs, code, hyperparameters, metrics, data versions, results, exploration visualizations and more. Everything is stored and backed-up in an organized knowledge repository, ready to be accessed, analyzed, shared and discussed within team. Free for individuals, educational and non-profit organizations.
More information at www.neptune.ai
About btov Partners
btov Partners, founded in 2000, is a European venture capital firm focusing on digital and industrial technologies. btov’s network of entrepreneurial private investors provides it with unique expertise and access to non-obvious investment themes and founders. The Digital Tech team focuses on startups primarily in AI, fintech, SaaS, logistics and digital marketplaces.
With offices in Berlin, Munich, St. Gallen and Luxembourg, the company manages assets of EUR 420 million. The most well-known investments include Blacklane, Data Artisans, DeepL, Facebook, Food- spring, ORCAM, Raisin, SumUp and XING.
More information at www.btov.vc
