Our Investment in Cinchy: Making Data Collaboration a Cinch
All organizations, but particularly large ones like financial institutions, maintain and utilize countless externally-licensed and internally-built applications. With each its own database and data silo. And with every additional application, organizations create more data. More data that is also stored, modified, copied and shared with other users and applications (in different databases and end-user systems).
Although organizations have attempted to bridge these (thousands) of data silos by having applications connect to each other, these technologies do not solve the root cause of data fragmentation – every application possessing its own database (and the aforementioned problems that ensue at scale). This fragmentation forces organizations to collectively spend billions every year on integration efforts using a patchwork of technologies and teams (think your classic “BI” or “data” teams internally: the guardians and providers of organizational data).
In an increasingly data-driven and competitive environment, organizations are in pursuit of a “golden record” of enterprise data in order to use its data and make decisions with agility. But databases (and data lakes, etc.) were not purpose-built for agile data collaboration, but for data storage instead. And while other legacy approaches such as data virtualization and MDM may appear to aggregate data together visually, they are poorly optimized for other use cases that would allow organizations to iterate and “build” on top of this data efficiently.
As an unfortunate result of the above, project delays are not abnormal in today’s enterprise IT delivery paradigm. Being “digital-first” in today’s era should no longer take enterprises quarters or years to achieve.
Meet Cinchy. Cinchy is a Data Collaboration company that enables FIs, telcos, public sector agencies, healthcare providers and other enterprises to share, use, visualize, build-upon and govern access to its data within the organization. Unlike other approaches, Cinchy’s solution allows users within these organizations to flexibly control and “build” or create functionality on top of its data (experiences, akin to mini-applications) instead of relying on other legacy applications to do so. Even with this newfound agility, privacy and security in Cinchy is a core feature and purpose-built by design into what the company calls its “Autonomous Data Fabric” at a granular level. It plays nice and syncs with other systems that traditionally house enterprise data as-needed. But as you add to its data fabric through additional usage and reduce your reliance on certain legacy systems over time, data network efforts increasingly form – resulting in an even faster and streamlined Data Collaboration experience and, naturally, a desire to primarily use Cinchy itself. Cinchy is used by organizations both to save money and resources (e.g., to consolidate systems), and is also used in new revenue initiatives – all with unprecedented time-to-value.
It should be no surprise then that large and forward-thinking organizations such as TD Bank, Colliers International, RBC Financial Group, PricewaterhouseCoopers, CI Investments and many others have selected Cinchy’s unique and powerful solution. Gartner and Forrester have also written extensively about Cinchy, highlighting the potential for its solution for all data-driven enterprises. As early stage-focused investors, we understand how difficult it is, and what a significant accomplishment it is, to have a meaningful amount of sophisticated customers already entrust Cinchy to help manage and utilize its important organizational data.
We are big believers and supporters of the company’s founders, Dan (CEO) and Karan (CTO), who have worked together for nearly a decade across two global banks (Citi and RBC) in enterprise technology-oriented roles before starting Cinchy. A problem they experienced firsthand there and know very well. And as a team, we have gotten to build a relationship with Dan and Karan for a number of years before leading its Series A investment. This includes our partner Dave meeting Dan during the RBC days when Cinchy was still an idea, our principal Alex supporting and tracking Cinchy since in its earliest innings when it had only one customer and our finance partner Kerri mentoring the company during its time with Techstars Toronto. We are very much looking forward to partnering with Cinchy in the years to come as it pursues category leadership in enterprise Data Collaboration.
Onwards.
– Dave, Alex and the Information Venture Partners team