Stemma + Teradata

Stemma’s story began well before the company was founded. Stemma started at Lyft; that company’s data had grown significantly, as had the need for its data to be used across the company. That led to the birth of Amundsen, which grew beyond Lyft to become the first modern open-source data catalog. It was termed “God’s work” and within a couple of months had 80% of data users at Lyft using it every week.

We decided to bring the same impact to a larger market in 2020 by founding Stemma. Three years later, Stemma is used by companies like iRobot, Convoy, SoFi and many others. A tremendous and heartfelt thank you to each of our customers. You trusted in us and played an instrumental role in helping us become the product and company we are today.

The problem we’ve been solving has been the same all along: addressing the monumental issue—of data trust. Organizations have tons of data, but due to the sheer amount of it — and the potential users — it’s not always clear what data exists, what’s fit for purpose and what’s trustworthy.

Initially, we targeted the lower enterprise segment. This customer set gave us an opportunity to learn and sell quickly. As we spent more time serving them, however, two things became clear:

1. The larger the organization, the more severe the problems around data trust, and hence more impact potential for Stemma.
2. The more we invested to solve these problems, the more we’d benefit from seamless access to richer platform metadata.

To move to a different segment of the market would require a significant investment in distribution, and it’s structurally really hard for a startup to bear the 2-year long sales cycle. As we were working on how best to bring our outstanding technology to a broader and larger array of enterprises, we were introduced to Teradata. Each conversation we had with them left us feeling deeply aligned at the core and excited about the value we could provide for customers.

All those conversations led us to today. Each one of Stemma’s employees is now a Teradata employee and we look forward to driving innovation in data cataloging and AI for Teradata customers.

Thanks to our customers, employees and investors (Sequoia and Engineering Capital) for helping us get to the next stage of our journey. We are excited and eager to show you what we build.

Stemma founders - Mark & Dorian