Vaultspeed, a Belgian scale-up, helps corporates organize and centralize their data in one place in a fast and easy way so that they can fully leverage the power of artificial intelligence. Customers include banks, insurance companies, government, manufacturers, and energy companies.
“If you are a company like a bank, you can’t differentiate yourself on AI alone because another bank will be using the exact same AI provided by Big Tech,” says Vaultspeed CEO and Co-founder Piet De Windt. “The way to differentiate yourself is by being faster and better in bringing data together and organizing it better. If you do that you will have a competitive advantage because the broader the data set and the better structured, the better the AI will understand and be useful in specific use cases.”
“Companies have been struggling for years to integrate their data and achieve a 360 degree view of the business,” says De Windt.Not long ago data teams had two choices: develop a solution manually or make use of classic extract, transform, and load (ETL) tools that move data between systems. This laborious task was both error-prone and cumbersome, he says. Each data mapping had to be built and a separate data modeling tool was often needed as well. This was acceptable for a small volume of transformation jobs but proved impossible for enterprise environments dealing with anywhere from 10 to 115 data sources or more.
Newer tools allow for the automation of all transformation code and Data Definition Language needed for building a modern data warehouse by providing engineers with a drag-and-drop graphical user interface (GUI) to manipulate the bulk process in one go without writing any line of code
Vaultspeed says it is unique in providing companies with an automated data transformation solution combining automation templates for all integration logics, a data modeling GUI and a metadata repository to allow businesses to drastically improve the velocity and quality of delivery and maintenance of their cloud data warehouse or data lakes.The six-year-old Leuven-based company’s no code model allows companies “to generate all the codes they need for the data platform out of the box,” says De Windt. “We ensure that all data is integrated, transformed, and modeled, steps that are often done manually today and are therefore time-consuming. We ensure that the right data is available and do so 23 times faster than what is currently measured.”
In addition to bringing all data sources to one central platform Vaultspeed ensures the data is consumable for end users, he says. It has created an abstract layer on top of the data which automatically builds templates, allowing data engineers to customize according to their requirements in a matter of days and weeks instead of the months required by traditional methods, says De Windt. Another differentiator is that Vaultspeed integrates data modeling and data transformation into one tool, he says. “All the other companies offer two separate tools,” says De Windt. “We have developed a unique process and built all the logic and templates and provide support so that our customers are unburdened. Our competitors require you to build it yourself. “
Perhaps the biggest asset for corporate clients is that it gives them resilience to change, says De Windt. “It is a major benefit to be able to set up data platforms quickly and connect new sources, but it is even more important to be able to handle all of the changes to the existing applications,” he says. “That is where the old data warehouse concept failed. It was not able to cope with the pace.”
Some of Vaultspeed’s customers are dealing with 80 new releases a month or more of changes to their data models. “It is unimaginable to do this without automation,” says De Windt. “You would need an army of people to keep up with it. The alternative is not to deal with it and view your data warehouse degrade day by day.”
Competitors include traditional data integration companies such as Informatica and Wherescape and newer upstarts such as Coalesce, a data transformation company that earlier this month announced that it has closed $50 million in Series B funding.
Vaultspeed announced that it has secured €15.1 million in Series A funding in November of last year. The round was led by Octopus Ventures, with additional participation from the current lead investor Fortino Capital, PMV, and BNP Paribas Fortis Private Equity. VaultSpeed said it intends to use the proceeds to expand its strong international presence and to further develop the platform automation capabilities.
The company also has established strategic partnerships with Snowflake, Microsoft, and Databricks, and has developed a network of over 30 service partners to serve clients on a global scale.
Vaultspeed is one of 48 deep tech scale ups that were selected to join The EIC Scaling Club, a curated community that includes investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders. (The Innovator’s Editor-in-Chief is on advisory board of The EIC Scaling Club, an arm of The European Innovation Council).
