Why We Invested: Nomad Data
We are thrilled to profile Nomad Data in this edition of our Why We Invested series! Nomad, the latest investment out of Fund II, is a data management and collaboration platform that utilizes natural language processing and machine learning to power all commercial data needs.
After five years of running the data analytics firm, Adaptive Management, Brad Schneider (Nomad’s Co-Founder and CEO) recognized the same core issues arising time and time again at companies leveraging external data. First off, companies need to know what type of third-party data to look for and where to find it, however, with the growing volume of data sources available, searching within traditional data marketplaces can be both costly and inefficient. If a company is able to acquire the datasets they seek, they are then faced with the challenge of storing, tracking, and sharing data within their internal systems. Without proper tools for data tracking and management, companies are at risk of spending unnecessarily by purchasing duplicative datasets and mismanaging data provider contract renewals.
Despite the clear lack of infrastructure to manage third-party data, over 80% of businesses surveyed in the 2021 Explorium Annual Report reported spending upwards of six-to-seven figures monthly on external data acquisition. Realizing the ever increasing need for companies to optimize the way they acquire, manage, and utilize external data, Brad partnered with Justin Manikas, Nomad Co-Founder and former Senior Director of Alternative Data Products at Amadeus, to create a solution.
With Nomad Data, Brad and Justin seek to equip external data stakeholders with the full range of tools they need. Today the platform is broken into 3 major components: Nomad’s discovery marketplace Connect, Data Relationship Manager, and Enterprise Data Discovery platform.
Through Connect, users can query hyper-specific requests and get matched to the right datasets and vendors directly in the platform’s data discovery platform. Given the precise nature of these requests, a Google search typically will not suffice, which is why Nomad utilizes AI to source datasets and data providers for each query. For example, let’s say an insurance professional is analyzing the safety of electric vehicles and they search for crash volumes of EVs compared to gas-powered vehicles. The user needs this information on a monthly basis to help underwrite auto insurance policies and reprice premiums. However, after a Google search the user only finds outdated research reports and an overwhelming number of other broad search results. With Nomad, the user can be quickly matched to a company that sells auto body shops software which helps manage their businesses. This software digitizes thousands of data points about a vehicle and its repairs, and while the dataset is vast, it houses the most up to date and accurate information to answer the initial question captured in the query. Furthermore, this software could inform dozens of other inquiries that the user may have down the line. A standard Google search would never lead the buyer to this dataset.
To fulfill requests like the above, Nomad leverages NLP to analyze each query and pinpoint a handful of matches within its 2,000+ provider network. Nomad’s NLP model strengthens with every request as it collects valuable insights around what datasets providers own and the various use cases served by their datasets, thereby further increasing the power of their search capabilities.
In addition to Connect, Nomad’s Data Relationship Manager (DRM) tool acts as a CRM to monitor, record, and manage relationships with every data provider a company interacts with. DRM users can track every interaction and manage subscriptions, contracts, and renewals automatically with data vendors. For companies aiming to data enable their entire organizations, Nomad’s Enterprise Data Discovery platform places the power of data into the hands of every business user. Enterprise users can find and catalog all purchased data in a centralized hub, making duplicative data purchases a non-issue and collaboration across teams seamless. Current plans for future product expansions include developing tools to play an even larger role in the transactions between business users and data providers, including offering pricing recommendations as well as infrastructure to facilitate payments, contracting, and invoicing.
As the $76 billion external data market continues to grow at a breakneck pace, the market demand for a solution like Nomad is only becoming more apparent. Already, the Nomad team has locked in a strong and growing customer base of some of the most reputable and well-established asset managers, consulting firms, insurance companies, and other major data acquirers. Nomad’s unique focus on efficiently arming business users with powerful and relevant data sets and data management tools is proving to add immediate value for these large corporations, where a rising number of internal users are utilizing Nomad’s platforms on a daily basis to answer key business questions. Nomad is already demonstrating a strong land and expand narrative, with contracted seats rapidly expanding based on the quick time to value demonstrated by the platform — we expect this trend to only become more pronounced as the Nomad team continues to roll out new features and product offerings.
Brad and Justin’s professional experiences uniquely position them to build an all-encompassing product that serves their key stakeholders: data buyers and sellers. While running Adaptive, Brad manually connected data buyers and sellers within the external data ecosystem. Brad also personally lived through the challenges of obtaining these external data sets to augment his professional performance as an investor at Tiger Management and Jericho Capital. On the other side of the table, Justin has spent much of his career focused on the data seller’s perspective, determining how to monetize external datasets. Most recently, he led travel giant Amadeus’ alternative data monetization business line, which he grew to 8-figures in ARR, and prior to that he served as the Director of Product Management at Dataminr, the $4.1 billion-valued information discovery platform. Collectively, these experiences have armed the Nomad team with extremely robust insights into both of their key stakeholders within the external data ecosystem. With these information asymmetries at hand, we believe that Brad, Justin, and the entire Nomad organization are very well equipped to address the massive market opportunity within the industry.
Struck Capital is thrilled to have led Nomad’s $3.2M Seed fundraise alongside TenOneTen, Bloomberg Beta, Correlation Ventures, Flair Ventures, and an array of other strategic investors. The need for a solution like Nomad Data is clearly only growing as more data providers and datasets enter the market — we are so excited to be supporting the Nomad team as they continue to transform the way companies operate within the realm of big data.
Check out Nomad Data’s website to learn more!
www.nomad-data.com
