Data-sync workflow automation platform Syncari today announced that it raised $17.3 million in an oversubscribed series A. It brings the company’s total raised to over $26 million, and cofounder and CEO Nick Bonfiglio says it’ll be put toward growing the company’s workforce as well as market reach.

Companies can be stymied by data accumulating in their customer relationship management, marketing automation, enterprise resource management, and other cloud data sources. When teams can’t agree on which data represents the ground truth, performance can become stifled and revenue goals harder to attain. A recent survey by MIT and Databricks found that just 13% of organizations are delivering on their data strategy.

Newark, California-based Syncari, which was founded in 2019, offers an automation platform designed to help businesses solve data integration challenges. Syncari offers data cleansing, merging, and augmentation services, unifying and scoring in addition to cleaning data from systems before sending the data to departments’ sources of truth.

“Syncari was born out of frustration. Put simply, we can’t stand the fact that, despite the decades of effort poured into integrating and managing data across systems, confidence in that data by the very people that depend on it keeps getting worse,” Bonfiglio told VentureBeat via email. “We built our data automation platform to help revenue leaders and other key operations professionals take back control of their data and restore their confidence in it, once and for all.”

Syncari’s transactional engine maintains state and governs data across connected systems automatically. When new fields get added or removed to any data source, the platform updates affected processes. Automations and data policies created in Syncari interact with sources connected to a unified data model, while algorithms and business logic provide a data fitness index — a rollup of data quality complete with recommended actions to improve inputs.

“With Syncari, non-technical business users can stitch together disparate systems into a single, unified data model. They can then use this unified data model to enforce data consistency across the tech stack, applying codeless functions to transform, manage, and sync data so the resulting ‘unified customer view’ doesn’t get trapped in a non-operational data silo,” Bonfiglio said.

Data management automation

Syncari claims to eliminate manual data management tasks by generating automations with event-based triggers and drag-and-drop functions. Leveraging the platform, customers can automate workflows with templates that can be configured to meet specific needs. The templates, which can normalize, transform, enrich, merge, and de-duplicate data, complement a dictionary from which data objects can be created, deleted, searched for, tagged, and described.

Syncari can also enforce data governance by nominating data authorities. This enables the platform to apply data policies and auditing transactions to determine data lineage.

“We believe AI platforms often suffer from two critical flaws: they require expensive data scientists to implement and train; and without clean data, the results you get are essentially meaningless. Syncari has attempted to address both of these shortcomings for revenue professionals by requiring zero code development,” Bonfiglio said. “Right out of the box, we provide prebuilt models for predicting, propensity, forecasting/trends, and sentiment analysis … Second, built into Syncari is the ability to continuously measure and automatically improve cross-system data quality.”

Bonfiglio says that companies investing in data management stand to reap the business benefits. The big data market is worth $138.9 billion in 2020 and is expected to top $229.4 billion by 2025, according to Markets and Markets. And companies with the greatest overall growth and revenue earnings are three times more likely than other companies to say that their data and analytics initiatives have contributed at least 20% to earnings before interest and taxes over the past three years, a 2019 McKinsey report found.

“We empower non-technical business users to regain control of the data in their various applications — without the need to integrate that data. Using our no-code platform, business users with moderate spreadsheet skills can create data automations, something that would typically require expensive IT resources,” Bonfiglio continued. “The end result and core benefit: ‘citizen’ data professionals can solve their own data quality and consistency problems, and finally trust the metrics they use to run business — no matter which system they report them from.”

Animo Ventures, NextGen Venture Partners, SignalFire, and Dig Ventures — the fund started by Ross Mason, the cofounder of MuleSoft — participated in 19-employee Syncari’s latest funding round. Previously, the company closed a seed round led by SignalFire.