Waterline Data, data marketplace platform provider enabling smart data discovery and data governance, today announced that it has closed a $16 million Series B financing round led by Partech Ventures. As more enterprises embrace Big Data-driven decision making, they turn to Waterline Data to provide business analysts and data scientists with a self-service data catalog to find, understand, and provision data assets. Waterline Data accelerates data preparation and analytics, while enabling agile data governance of information assets with automated semantic discovery and data lineage. Building on its success with some of the leading enterprises and government agencies in the United States and Europe, Waterline Data will use the funds to expand sales and marketing operations and continue its R&D investment.

This represents the company's second round of funding, bringing the total capital raised to $23 million.

'Waterline Data provides a unique solution that fills a gap in data governance, data preparation, and data discovery for big data in the enterprise. We are excited to back Waterline Data's tremendously experienced team in building a global company,' said Nicolas El Baze, General Partner, Partech Ventures.

Waterline Data was founded in 2013 with backing from Menlo Ventures and Jackson Square Ventures (formerly Sigma West). The inspiration for the name 'Waterline' came from the metaphor of the data lake where the data is hidden below the waterline. The mission of Waterline Data is to help business analysts and data scientists find, understand, and provision information assets through self-service - without having to 'dive' for data - as well as help data stewards provide agile data governance to enable rapid time to value.

'Enterprises around the world are updating their data architectures to enable self-service while also providing agile data governance. On one hand, the business wants faster time to value from Big Data and sees self-service as the way to go, and on the other hand IT wants to facilitate sound data management and data governance without being the gatekeeper,' said Alex Gorelik, founder and CEO of Waterline Data. 'As a result, enterprises are evolving their data lakes, data ponds, and data hubs to encompass all enterprise information assets, creating a 'data marketplace' for business users.'

Waterline Data is pioneering the 'data marketplace' platform by providing smart data discovery to discover and crowdsource business metadata, data lineage, and infonomics, underlying a self-service business data catalog across on-premise and cloud data sources.

'We see a need for automated data discovery solutions like Waterline Data in helping our clients achieve greater business value from their Big Data assets. This investment underscores our commitment to our clients to bring innovative Big Data solutions across our platforms and offerings,' said Ritika Suri, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Infosys.