Switchboard Raises $7 Million to Align Business Needs with Data Engineering Resources  

Marketing and revenue teams can stand up analytics and AI projects 10x faster through automated data engineering platform 

Switchboard, the leading data engineering automation platform, today announced a $7M Series A round of funding.  The raise, co-led by GFT Ventures and Quest Venture Partners, will allow the company to invest more heavily in their data engineering automation platform, already in use by data-driven brands like DotDashMeredith, OrangeTheory Fitness, and Financial Times.  As part of the raise,  Jeff Herbst, Founding Managing Partner of GFT Ventures and Marcus Ogawa, Managing Partner of Quest Venture Partners, will join the company’s Board of Directors. 

Switchboard is a SaaS platform used by revenue and marketing data teams to launch and maintain data projects – without the need for engineering resources. Leveraging reusable templates and automated SOC-compliant data management, the company’s technology allows enterprises to drive data projects at scale, 10x faster than through internal development. This frees up development teams from burdensome operations so that they can focus on more strategic projects. With Switchboard’s technology:

• Business leaders can make decisions quickly and independently – without having to jockey for stack rank in engineering priorities. This speeds up the time to insight exponentially. 
• Organizations can rest assured that their data management is SOC-compliant and reliable – even at terabyte scale
• Silos are broken down and a single source of truth allows stakeholders to work with the same clean, organized data across the company. 

“Data is the fuel of modern AI and Machine Learning models.  And as enterprise adoption of AI continues to accelerate, the need for consistently clean, organized and reliable data will become more and more critical, said Jeff Herbst, Founding Managing Partner at GFT Ventures. “The Switchboard data engineering platform, targeted and controlled by business users within the enterprise, provides the most practical and elegant solution to this data-first mindset that we’ve seen to date.  GFT is delighted to lead this new round of funding for Switchboard, as we see huge potential for the combination of best-in-class AI and data science solutions within every enterprise and every industry.”

Co-founders Ju-kay Kwek and Michael Manoocheri, who led the launch of Google BigQuery, understood the opportunity to unburden data engineers from taxing and time-consuming operational and maintenance tasks that were preventing them from focusing on more strategic projects, especially in AI and Machine Learning.  They also understood that business teams wanted the ability to take responsibility for their own data ecosystem, consolidate their business rules in a single source of truth, and share their domain expertise to one another and with data engineering. Through a hosted SaaS solution, Switchboard is able to help both free up data engineering resources and allow business users – the people who understand the context of the data the best – to connect to it directly. 

“Across industries we’re seeing companies be disrupted by those who understand that media data is the key to digital customer acquisition and engagement,” said Ju-kay Kwek, Co-Founder and CEO of Switchboard. “But the challenges posed by the explosion of data silos plus the shortage of technical resources makes it difficult for enterprise teams to drive adoption of data-driven initiatives. We’ve seen especially strong adoption and retention rates among customers whose business teams are empowered to take control of the data – of which they have the best context –  to drive more meaningful results, faster.” 

Customers already using Switchboard cite its ability to speed up both access to data and time to insights. Notably: 

• “Switchboard enabled my team to stand up global marketing funnel analytics from scratch in less than 6 months.” – Chief Technology Officer at Global Fitness Brand

• “By working with Switchboard, we’re finally able to have a single, real-time and actionable view of revenue and yield across all of our brands,  Chief Digital Officer at Global Media Company 

• “Switchboard enables us to run and measure 3 separate sales teams under one umbrella, without having to build a data engineering team.”  SVP Revenue at Global Media Company 

The company will use the funding to invest for the first time in GTM functionalities aimed at serving a wider set of customers. It will also invest even more in the product, enhancing self-service usability data visualization to enable business users to do more with features enabled by machine learning. Their next phase is to take the data products they’ve worked on with advanced customers, and turn them into first class products of their own. To date, the company has already launched Digital Media RevOps, Campaign Analytics, and Programmatic Reporting.