Orchestra: A single point of control for lean data teams

Data teams today face significant challenges in releasing data into production reliably and efficiently. The rapid pace of data changes, combined with a lack of modularity and orchestration, feels like an endless battle to produce consistent and reliable datasets. This is even more pressing in the age of AI.

80% of data and AI initiatives fail, often due to a lack of governance in data pipelines and quality monitoring frameworks. And investing in a data team and building a robust data platform in-house can take millions of dollars and years to perfect – and this approach places immense pressure on enterprise data teams.

That’s why Hugo Lu (CEO) and Will Davies (CTO) built Orchestra – a data orchestration and observability tool designed for lean data teams. Meaning data engineers and architects can spend less time fixing broken things and more time on what matters: building.

Their mission is to provide the core infrastructure for data platforms through orchestration, observability, and data quality metrics. Orchestra offers a Unified Control Plane for data operations, enabling users to build data pipelines and data products, automate pipeline execution, and gather metadata in a governed way – all without the need to maintain any infrastructure. This metadata provides invaluable insights for data teams, including asset-based lineage, data quality monitoring, and alerting from day one.

This consolidated approach significantly accelerates the time-to-live for data and AI initiatives while decreasing total cost of ownership. By leveraging Orchestra’s modular architecture, organisations can build reliable and scalable data products immediately. Fixed pricing for enterprises ensures cost predictability, and the platform offers over 30 integrations, including warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks and BigQuery, and transformation frameworks like dbt and Coalesce.

Hugo and Will are no strangers to the pain points of data teams. Hugo was previously Head of Data at London-based fintech Codat, and Will was Head of Product Engineering at visual privacy and security company Pimloc. Both share a real passion for the space and a sense of urgency. Hugo is already a recognised voice in data engineering, with his blog, endorsed by the CEO of Databricks, which has helped them rapidly build a community of over 30,000 data practitioners over the last year. From their inception in July 2023 they’ve already won a significant number of contracts with enterprise and digital-native customers, establishing themselves as leaders in the field. Early users – Graniterock Construction, the San Francisco Giants, Powell Industries, Chobani, and Vision Labs – are achieving remarkable efficiency with Orchestra’s out-of-the-box orchestration, monitoring, and quality testing capabilities.

So we’re delighted to be leading Orchestra’s £1m pre-seed, alongside Sequoia’s Scout Fund and angel investors from companies like dbt, Snowflake, and Snowplow.

The investment has allowed the Orchestra team to build a best-in-class control plane for data operations and ship new features rapidly. The team is set to launch its Core Observability Suite and Data Catalog, and build over 100 new integrations. Over the coming months, Orchestra will continue to develop its platform and expand its go-to-market strategy across Europe, Australia, and the US.

Congratulations again to Hugo, Will, and the team. And welcome to the Moonfire family.

If you’re taking your first steps in the data journey, conducting a cloud migration, or struggling to tie together your data stack, get started with Orchestra’s free tier.

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