Imagine you walk into a library where books are scattered without any organization. Nonfiction may be shuffled in with poetry, which is stacked alongside mysteries, and so on. Finding what you’re looking for is going to be nearly impossible.
Businesses recognize similar problems in raw, unrefined data. Many of them fail in thier data initiatives because they are technology-driven rather than business-driven. So, entrepreneur Kishore Venugopalan decided to come up with a solution. The resulting startup MetaWare is designed to empower business-driven data management, providing companies with self-service tools for accessing insights from their data.
“Our mission is to transform business users into tech-savvy champions so they can do data management on their own,” Venugopalan said.
Cary-based MetaWare is a part of this year’s cohort at Launch Chapel Hill, which is an accelerator for early-stage startups. Venugopalan said he had been working on developing his minimum viable product (MVP), but the Launch program assisted him with the promotion of his company by helping him create a pitch deck, connect with UNC interns, and further customer discovery.
“It’s really good to have that space and connect with different innovators who [are on] the same journey,” Venugopalan said.
Venugopalan has over 20 years of experience in data management and analytics; through it all, he’s encountered many pain points when it comes to businesses’ access and understanding of their own data. Often, companies will hire an external consultant to build their data platforms, but Venugopalan said this often causes a disconnect between the business and the technology.
In many larger companies, there are several divisions—sales, HR, finance, etc.—in which people are experts on their own work. But if each of these divisions isn’t supervising or governing its own data, there can still be failures or misunderstandings when it comes to an outside source managing their information.
In bigger firms that may have their own centralized data teams, meanwhile, Venugopalan said these teams may become “clogged with requests” and lack the capacity to address each division’s data-related requests.
By contrast, MetaWare’s solution gives ownership to businesses by providing a self-service tool for data management, so that each division is in control of its own data projects.
“They are the experts, they know what they’re doing, and they can manage it better,” Venugopalan said.
MetaWare’s product provides a “hybrid data mesh” for each of the business divisions. This approach allows business teams to take ownership and accountability of their data, focusing on business-related elements while leaving technically challenging tasks to technology teams. This ensures a clear separation of responsibilities between business and technology teams.
To return to the library metaphor, the effect is as if once genres are separated into their own sections, there is now an expert librarian assigned to each one. You can go to the fantasy shelves or the memoir shelves and ask for the best book in the section, and the librarian can provide detailed, informed feedback.
In addition to larger businesses, MetaWare is targeting early-stage startups that don’t yet have technology teams. The company has already partnered with solar company SunDAO, which is working on solar data aggregation (and which GrepBeat has written about previously).
QUICK BITS
Startup: MetaWare
Founder: Kishore Venugopalan (CEO)
Founded: 2023
Location: Cary
Funding: Bootstrapped
Size of team: 1, full-time
Through his customer discovery, Venugopalan learned that many businesses are still operating in Excel spreadsheets or MS Access, which is reportedly inefficient. Nevertheless, he said people are comfortable with the systems they have, even if it is time consuming and disorganized.
“The challenge is to make them realize that there is an efficient way to do this,” Venugopalan said.
MetaWare was founded in fall 2023, and Venugopalan expects to launch his product in March 2025.
Once the product is launched, there will be two revenue streams. One will be an annual recurring fee, which will provide upgrades, de-bugging, and continuous system monitoring. The other will be a consulting service, through which MetaWare will work with customers for a few months to set up the product.
