23 October 2018
Promethium: Starting a Fire
When we met Kaycee Lai, we were instantly excited about his vision to help enterprises manage and get value from their data sprawl.
Zetta invests in AI-first, B2B startups, and as a result, we spend a lot of time talking to enterprises about their data. Those conversations begin with optimism for the nearly unlimited business potential in their broad holdings of enterprise data. But as we dig deeper, we hear more about the obstacles: months of work preparing and cleaning data before projects can begin; always too much work, and not enough trained data engineers and data scientists to tackle it all. It’s hard to confidently predict whether a project will be valuable and even harder to prevent compliance and user privacy missteps.
We’ve argued that data is not the new oil, because not all data is equally valuable — knowing the context of your dataset is the first step to making it useful. Understanding the context of that data upfront prevents sinking months of work into data preparation without knowing its value, the questions it can answer, and if privacy regulations even allow its use. We’re believers in using data to get insights into every part of the business — and that should include the data assets, themselves!
Promethium founder Kaycee Lai saw companies stymied by these same problems from the vendor side, having played key leadership roles at data infrastructure startups and market leaders, including Waterline Data, Delphix, and VMware. He’s worked with customers of all sizes on storing, managing, and understanding their data, and emerged with genuine insight into why so many big-budget data initiatives fail to deliver value to their stakeholders. He and the team at Promethium are helping customers flip the script and derive value from their data assets, more quickly, more comprehensively, and more safely. And beyond all that, we love Kaycee’s authentic passion to help enterprise customers succeed. An investment is a long-term partnership, and we’re excited to be in partnership with Kaycee.
Promethium is ready to usher in a new paradigm for discovering and understanding enterprise data, and Zetta is delighted to join them on this journey!
