Since 2020, I’d been running a consulting business, helping companies transform their data capabilities with modern data technologies. One of my clients happened to be Kait, now my co-founder and COO. My team helped her create a consolidated asset of shopping behavior data they could use to help sell the company.
In September 2022, I flew to San Francisco to help Kait and her team pitch the company’s new data capabilities. She and I were having a beer in a hole-in-the-wall bar a few hours before the meeting, where she asked me the now-famous question: “Why is this so expensive?”
I found myself explaining complicated data technology and architectural strategies — all of which needed expensive teams like mine to implement — to which she replied, “Could we simplify it?”
I’m a software engineer and a builder. So I said, “Yeah, I think we could.”
And boom, Pliable had its mission.
We started Pliable to make every company data-driven — not just enterprises with budgets large enough to hire data engineers and implement complicated infrastructure.
There’s a significant, but rarely-mentioned gap between having access to data and being able to use it for business decisions: businesses need a comprehensive, reliable source of truth for their data in order to actually put it to work. Right now, that gap is filled with buzzwords, complicated technology and costly data professionals.
The businesses that can afford it are hemorrhaging cash, purchasing 5–10 different point solutions for orchestration, governance, observability and lineage, and bringing in engineers and architects to write custom code to wire them all together.
What has this created? A cycle of larger companies realizing their data management has become too complex (and expensive) and smaller companies having no option aside from manual, error-prone, Excel-based workflows. It’s a mess.
But now, there’s a solution to simplify this process.
At Pliable, we’ve built a simple, affordable, no-code solution that helps businesses implement a modern data strategy and use their data effectively, all without any engineering.
By cleaning, combining, de-duplicating, and validating data across multiple sources, Pliable empowers users to quickly compile a source of truth for data across the entire business, built for any reporting, AI or integration use case — ultimately replacing the need for data engineering teams and complicated infrastructure.
The Funding (And The Future) At Pliable, we’re not the only ones who see the issues companies face with data management — or simply data accessibility. But we’re here to do it the right way.
Therefore, we’re proud to announce our seed round led by Resolute Ventures, including participation from CEAS, Counterview Capital and other investors, to help us rocket launch out of stealth backed by $2.5 million. With this investment, we’ll strategically expand our team and platform to allow anyone to create a source of truth and start measuring and optimizing their business.
The majority of the tools in the market were created by data people, for other data people, to solve problems that only arise while building custom, over-engineered data platforms.
We want to take a different approach by crafting a solution for everyone else, giving everyone access to advanced data capabilities without having to hire data engineers or having to know the difference between a data warehouse and a data lake. With this funding and a strong bench of partners, we’re well on our way toward our goal.
Don’t believe us? Here’s what our partners are already saying:
Mike Hirshland, founder of Resolute Ventures:
“We get excited by exceptional founding teams who have figured out how to optimize efficiency and impact the bottom line for a large market of customers. And so Pliable was a natural fit, accomplishing this by making data available and comprehensible for everyone and every type of business. Pliable customers can operate as the most effective version of themselves.”
Mike Wohl, chief investment officer at CEAS:
“The modern data stack has evolved quickly, and CEAS has had a front-row seat as an early investor in Fivetran. From that seat, we see a downstream friction of non-technical user adoption for which Pliable solves. Pliable is the solution that will enable low-tech and/or low-budget data-curious teams to answer their business intelligence questions. While many new startups are entering the transformation game to compete with dbt, Pliable is expanding the pie of buyers to include a new buyer set the current modern data stack couldn’t reach.”