Data startup Cybersyn raises $63 million in Snowflake-led funding round

By Krystal Hu

(Reuters) - Data startup Cybersyn said it has raised $62.9 million from investors including Snowflake Inc, Coatue Management and Sequoia Capital, its chief executive told Reuters.

The investment marks the first time that Snowflake has led a startup funding round, as the data cloud giant looks to expand its data marketplace for enterprise users to acquire live and ready-to-use dataset.

New York-based Cybersyn was founded in 2022 by Alex Izydorczyk, former head of data science at Coatue. The company aims to sell proprietary economic datasets to investors, governments and other corporate clients.

Cybersyn plans to use the capital to expand its eight-person team and acquire more proprietary data to create data products with a focus on macroeconomic trends.

Besides using public data sources, the startup is also working on identifying and partnering with proprietary data sources, including buying aggregated anonymized data from non-data provider corporations.

It has released free and paid datasets on Snowflake, including e-commerce spending data, that could be sold to corporates across industries, including financial services, consumer and pharmaceuticals.

"We're not trying to just be a data broker. We're trying to actually add value to the data we acquire and combine it," said Izydorczyk.

Snowflake Marketplace allows users to access third-party data and pay for specific datasets, and combine it with their own corporate data using its platform. It now has more than 1,800 dataset listings.

"Cybersyn is a company that was built for this era of data sharing and moving with agility. We think of the marketplace as a core part of our offering. If someone is willing to be strategically aligned with us, we're happy to invest," said Christian Kleinerman, senior vice president of product at Snowflake.

Kleinerman and Thomas Laffont, co-founder and senior managing director at Coatue, have joined Cybersyn's board of directors.

(Reporting by Krystal Hu in New York; Editing by Christopher Cushing)