Coalesce to scale code-first, GUI-driven data transformations with $26M

Today, data warehouses are critical to decision-making. They have grown significantly over the years and help companies bring together information from different source systems, such as traditional on-premises platforms, for historical and trend analysis. But, consolidating data in a data warehouse is not enough to achieve that. The information also needs to be transformed into a consumable format.

There are plenty of options for data transformation, but each comes with its own set of limitations. For instance, legacy wizard or widget-based GUI tools are easy to use but rigid, failing to handle complex transformations at scale, while code-first transformation solutions are flexible, but demand mountains of manual work and take up a considerable amount of engineering resources.

Coalesce brings best of both worlds

To fill this gap, San Francisco-based Coalesce offers a code-first, GUI-driven tool that brings the best of both worlds – without the downsides – for managing and building transformations in the Snowflake data cloud. The company today announced $26 million in a series A round of funding.

“Our product solves the largest bottleneck in analytics today by combining the speed of an intuitive graphical user interface with the flexibility of code, plus a healthy dose of automation, to enable rapid data transformations. Coalesce simplifies the modeling, cleansing, governance, and documentation of data by bringing never-before-seen efficiency and flexibility to the analytics landscape,” Armon Petrossian, CEO and founder of the company, told VentureBeat. This eventually results in high-quality data for analysis as well as an increase in data engineer productivity.

The transformation offering, as the company explained, organizes data in an easy-to-access and read manner. It is powered by a column-aware architecture that leverages column names and mappings for easily managing transformations with an understanding of how the data is related or connected. Plus, there are data-transformation automation templates, which users can edit, save and share to keep everyone on their team on the same page.

“Coalesce provides enterprise users the extensibility they need to customize and automate their data transformations in a way no other technology can. The product’s simple and easy-to-use interface allows data teams to accelerate even the most complex data transformations,” Petrossian noted.

Data transformation competitors

While Coalesce claims differentiation with its code-first, GUI-driven approach and automation capabilities, it is not the only player in the space. 

The growing volume of data within the enterprise has led to the rise of multiple transformation-specific offerings, including dbt Labs, Matillion, Incorta and Etleap. Dbt Labs, in particular, has seen significant demand in the last few years. The company’s framework is used by more than 9,000 companies and its revenue has grown by six times in the last year alone.

Coalesce’s CEO did not share the exact growth figures of his company. However, he did note that they have onboarded multiple Fortune 500 customers in all major geographies (EMEA, North America and APAC).

Road ahead

With this round of funding, which was led by Emergence Capital, the company plans to invest in its product and ecosystem and gear up for a major surge in the demand for data transformation tools. 

“Moving forward, our mission is to empower organizations challenged by vast amounts of growing data looking to be data-driven and more productive by automating as many transformations as possible. Our mission is to help organizations and people democratize data by providing them with a technology that simplifies and automates the most complex part of the analytics workflow,” Petrossian said.