26 October 2021
Telm.ai: Great Tools Make Great Data
Jocelyn Goldfein
Managing Director
.png)
It’s a real pleasure to welcome new startups to the Zetta family, and Telm.ai is no exception. Zetta invests exclusively in AI-centric startups whose products are powered by data and machine learning, or who are building the infrastructure and platforms to enable those products. Telm.ai happens to be doing both.
We work on a daily basis with startups deploying ML in production for enterprise customers. While code and algorithms tend to capture the imagination when outsiders think of the tech industry, our passionate belief is that data is at least as fundamental. We hear again and again, from entrepreneurs and enterprises, that ML projects suffer from “shiny object syndrome” and that the toughest challenge in getting value from AI projects comes from the unsexy problems: getting clean, reliable and usable data. It doesn’t sound so difficult, but it’s where most of the industry is getting stuck today.
Telm.ai founders Mona Rakibe and Max Lukichev lived it first hand as early product and engineering leaders at Reltio, helping customers find value in their data - if only they could first establish clean and reliable data feeds. Max’s background at SignalFX and Splunk also led him to the insight that observability techniques pioneered in cloud infrastructure management could be applied towards the quality and reliability of the data itself. Mona and Max were inspired to start Telm.ai, both from seeing customer pain up close and personal, and from seeing the potential to solve those problems with machine learning.
Since we made our investment, Mona and Max have built a team, joined and graduated from YC, and accelerated quickly through product development and early customer discovery. Today we’re thrilled to join them in announcing their funding alongside one of our favorite co-investors at .406 Ventures. More importantly, we are thrilled to share the news of their publicly available product and their first customer wins: Dun & Bradstreet and Myers-Holum.
If you follow Zetta, chances are you work with data. Give Telmai a try for yourself and see what a difference great tooling makes to data quality.
