Cybersyn is a data-as-a-service (DaaS) company, focused on making the world’s economic data available to governments and businesses. Cybersyn aspires to combine public and proprietary data to create derived products useful for market intelligence, investment, and policy decisions. Many organizations have embraced data science internally but could benefit from incorporating third-party data into their decision-making process. This funding round will enable us to continue building our team and acquiring the data to make this aspiration a reality. 

Today, proprietary datasets, even if you know where to buy them, are complex, opaque, and slow. The datasets are often arbitrarily priced and require significant engineering effort to manage. At the same time, governments publish reams of data – but they’re slow and every agency has a different format for their data. Consequently, data science teams have mostly focused on internal data, when many business problems could be better solved with external data. Simultaneously, the events of the last few years have shown the critical role data plays in monitoring our economy: real-time data on the pandemic, inflation, or consumer spending may very well make the difference between business success or failure. 

At Coatue, a technology-focused investment firm, I started and led a team to apply external (alternative) data to the investing process. In practice, this meant finding proprietary datasets to source, diligence, and add value to investments. Coatue developed a reputation for using this data to navigate markets, and I developed an appreciation for how much commerce can be understood if painstakingly modeled with hard-to-find data. While there, I also had the opportunity to participate in Coatue’s bet on Snowflake, a leading cloud-based data platform as a customer and an investor.

Cybersyn is the combination of my two experiences with Coatue and Snowflake: the ability to leverage external data on top of the most powerful, full-service technology. Christian Kleinerman and the team at Snowflake have extended the Snowflake product beyond just a data warehouse – it is a platform for apps, machine learning, and, of course, datasets. There is a clear opportunity to remove a major technical barrier in sharing data, which enables Cybersyn to focus on what we do best: finding and transforming proprietary content into commercially relevant datasets. 

We are starting with content that measures where consumers are spending time and money. Cybersyn has already launched a series of public data listings, available at no cost on the Snowflake Marketplace, focused on distributing government data on consumer spending, inflation, and interest rates in a consistent format. And now, we are launching our eCommerce Benchmarks, focused on measuring ad spending and online sales by category. In the future, we expect to launch datasets focused on consumer spending in the United States, with a particular focus on digital transactions at greater frequencies and granularity than publicly available. These datasets will help investors, advertisers, and retailers measure their competitors. 

Cybersyn is also an investment in people. There is a lack of analysts bridging the gap between technical skill sets and commercial applications of data. There is a wealth of data that goes unused because the individuals with the technical expertise to analyze it are often not the same individuals who have the business acumen to apply it effectively. Bridging that gap: going from raw data to usable data is our core focus. We are growing our team in New York and looking for commercial, pragmatic engineers, and researchers interested in building the “Simcity for the real world” and pioneering the next generation of economic data: near real-time, joinable, and accessible. You’ll work on cleaning, transforming, and modeling the most interesting economic data.

We are grateful to the teams at Snowflake, Sequoia, and Coatue for their support. As a former Coatue partner, it is particularly meaningful to have the firm’s support once again from a different vantage point. We look forward to learning from Sequoia and Snowflake’s best-in-class operators. 

Cybersyn’s products are available today on the Snowflake Marketplace, beginning with free, public-domain data and paid, proprietary eCommerce benchmarks. Data is sourced from the public domain, government agencies, and open data organizations and is shared for free, with the added benefit of standardization. Our proprietary data, like our Shopify Benchmarks, is focused on where consumers are spending money and time, and we will be available soon. 

Alex

Founder & CEO