Hevo Data gets $1M in seed funding to streamline data integration

Going from food delivery to data integration might seem like an unlikely progression for a startup team, but it was a natural fit for Hevo Data’s founders. Manish Jethani and Sourabh Agarwal previously launched SpoonJoy, an on-demand restaurant delivery app in India. The challenges they encountered while analyzing data in order to improve SpoonJoy’s service inspired them to form Hevo Data, a cloud-based data integration platform which just raised $1 million in seed funding led by IDG Ventures India.

Hevo Data chief executive officer Jethani (Agarwal is its chief technology officer) explains that SpoonJoy, whose investors included SAIF Partners, needed to analyze data from many sources. For example, if order volume started to drop in one area, the team would look at web and ad traffic, customer engagement and feedback, as well as activity by competing services. That meant they needed to draw on data from Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Zendesk or Salesforce, which had to be organized and formatted first. This is a time-consuming process and without a data integration platform, small to medium-sized companies may only be able to analyze data once or twice a week.

“One of the challenges of food delivery is that the data needs to be highly optimized,” says Jethani. “Food margins are very low, so if your delivery cost is high, you will not make money. So we built a lot of technology to optimize the logistics part of things. We fundamentally come from a very strong engineering and data background and we wanted to solve food delivery with data.”

SpoonJoy was acquired by Grofers, one of India’s largest online grocery delivery services, in 2015. Afterward, Jethani and Agarwal spent a year working at Grofers before founding Hevo Data, which has offices in Bangalore and San Francisco.

Jethani says Hevo Data’s solutions can reduce the amount of time needed to prepare data to a few minutes.