Monte Carlo Launches ‘Insights’ for Operational Analytics

Monte Carlo launched in 2019 with the aim of improving data reliability. In the intervening two years, the company has raised more than $101 million in funding to advance this goal – and now, that investment is bearing new fruit: Monte Carlo has announced Insights, a new tool built on top of its data observability platform that uses machine learning to offer customers operational analytics.

Monte Carlo pitches its data observability platform, launched in December, as “the first end-to-end solution to prevent broken data pipelines.” This spring, Monte Carlo CEO Barr Moses explained their concept of data observability to Datanami as addressing “the worst thing that can happen” in data analytics: “when you start using the data, but it actually can’t be trusted.”

The platform monitors clients’ data stacks, applying machine learning to proactively identify data issues and notify data managers. The platform also includes automated data catalog and metadata management, as well as generally unified visibility for data stores.

The new Insights tool takes that further, using the synthesized metadata from the platform to generate dashboards, analyze team performance, and more. The company says that Insights can even be used to develop and track service-level agreements. The synthesized metadata and insights can also be downloaded as CSVs or accessed directly by Snowflake customers. Monte Carlo hopes that this product will lower the barrier for delivering intelligent insights.

“Companies have tried to build this kind of solution in-house, but the efforts are often ad hoc, manual, resource-intensive, and unable to evolve with business needs. Insights is fully automated so it can cover a company’s entire data stack,” said Uri Shahar, head of data at Monte Carlo. “Our machine learning scores data assets based on active users, average daily reads, their relationship to upstream and downstream assets, and their connection to important service-level indicators and data quality checks. Such insights make it easy for teams to set data strategy and prioritize accordingly based on what data matters most to the business.”

The announcement of Insights comes on the heels of a Series C funding round led by ICONIQ Growth in August that raised $60 million. Previously, a Series B round in February had raised $25 million. Monte Carlo counts among its customers big names like Fox, Vimeo, Mercari, and ShopRunner.

“To set our stakeholders up for success, we need to ensure that our data pipelines are performant and our data is reliable,” said Valerie Rogoff, director of data analytics architecture at ShopRunner. “As part of this vision for data trust, we’ve integrated our Snowflake and Looker data stack with Monte Carlo’s Data Observability Platform to gain unprecedented visibility into our data ecosystem through end-to-end lineage and ensure that data is accurate and up-to-date at each stage of its life cycle. We’re excited to partner with Monte Carlo on their vision for Insights, a new and powerful way to understand what data assets matter most to our business and how we can better drive an impact with our data across the organization.”