Draft:Lightup Data, Inc.

Lightup

Lightup (also known as Lightup Data) is a private, venture-backed startup founded in 2019 and headquartered in Mountain View, California. Lightup offers an AI-powered data quality and observability platform designed to democratize and automate data integrity monitoring across hybrid data ecosystems. The platform empowers both technical and non-technical users to create checks, detect anomalies, and remediate issues at scale. [1]

History

• April 2021 – Launched a beta program enabling automated data quality monitoring for SQL and streaming sources like Snowflake, Databricks, and Kafka {https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/04/21/2214221/0/en/Lightup-Announces-Beta-Program-for-Breakthrough-Data-Quality-Monitoring-Solution-to-Make-Data-Decisions-and-Applications-Dependable.html}
• August 2023 – Closed a $9 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Newlands, with participation from Spectrum 28 Capital, Shasta Ventures, Vela Partners, and Incubate Fund {https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/08/02/2716892/0/en/Lightup-Closes-9-Million-Series-A-Round-Led-By-Andreessen-Horowitz-and-Newland-Ventures-to-Democratize-No-Code-Data-Quality-Checks-Across-Enterprise-Operations.html}
• December 2024 – Publicized its fifth anniversary, revealing that its enterprise customers were running over 500,000 daily data checks, covering 12+ PB of data across 2,500+ tables, resulting in a >90% reduction in data-related business incidents

Platform & Technology

Lightup offers a modular, scalable architecture characterized by:

• Pushdown architecture: Executes quality checks in-place on source systems—like cloud data warehouses and Kubernetes-based streaming—without moving data; thus minimizing performance impact {https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/02/lightup-wants-to-shine-a-light-on-data-quality-with-9m-series-a/}
• Flexible rule creation: Supports no-code/low-code builders, SQL interfaces, and API/SDK for custom workflows
• Anomaly detection & metrics: Users define data metrics (like row counts, null ratios) and separate monitors for threshold/dynamic anomaly detection, with customizable alerting for incidents
• Incident workflows & alerting: Provides incident dashboards, failing-records diagnostics, and integrations with Slack, PagerDuty, Teams, Jira, and ServiceNow for timely alerting and collaboration {https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/08/02/2716892/0/en/Lightup-Closes-9-Million-Series-A-Round-Led-By-Andreessen-Horowitz-and-Newland-Ventures-to-Democratize-No-Code-Data-Quality-Checks-Across-Enterprise-Operations.html}
• Unstructured data support (beta): Adds monitoring for document and LLM data sources (“Genie” copilot preview) .
• Slices & reconciliation checks: Enables granular checks (e.g., by brand/region) and comparisons between source-target or time-based datasets
• Data profiling & lineage integration: Includes automated profiling and integrates with data catalogs (Alation, Atlan, Collibra) for enriched lineage and governance

Market Adoption & Impact

Lightup targets large enterprises undergoing modern data transformation. As of late 2024, the platform was used by Fortune 500 customers including McDonald’s, Skechers, Gap Inc., and Baker Hughes, delivering up to five‑fold growth in annual recurring revenue, driving significant improvements in data trust, operational efficiency, and reducing incident resolution effort {https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/08/02/2716892/0/en/Lightup-Closes-9-Million-Series-A-Round-Led-By-Andreessen-Horowitz-and-Newland-Ventures-to-Democratize-No-Code-Data-Quality-Checks-Across-Enterprise-Operations.html}

Leadership & Investors

• Founder & CEO: Manu Bansal, Ph.D. Stanford, previously co-founder of Uhana (acquired by VMware in 2019) {https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/02/lightup-wants-to-shine-a-light-on-data-quality-with-9m-series-a/}
• Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Newlands, Spectrum 28 Capital, Shasta Ventures, Vela Partners, and Incubate Fund {https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/08/02/2716892/0/en/Lightup-Closes-9-Million-Series-A-Round-Led-By-Andreessen-Horowitz-and-Newland-Ventures-to-Democratize-No-Code-Data-Quality-Checks-Across-Enterprise-Operations.html}

Recognition

• Series A (2023): $9 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz to support enterprise-scale adoption .
• TechCrunch coverage emphasized Lightup’s approach of checking data in-place across modern data architectures {https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/02/lightup-wants-to-shine-a-light-on-data-quality-with-9m-series-a/}

Scale & Achievements

As of December 2024:

• Over 500,000 daily checks
• Monitoring 12+ petabytes across 2,500+ tables
• Facilitating 500+ users in data-monitoring workflows
• Resulted in >90% reduction in business incidents from data failures

Future Developments

• Expanding unstructured data quality monitoring for GenAI/LLMs
• Launching “Genie”, an AI copilot for workflow support in beta
• Continuous expansion of connectors and integrations across enterprise stacks

See also

• Data quality
• Data observability
• Data pipeline
• Pushdown query

References (Citations included inline from TechCrunch, GlobeNewswire, SiliconANGLE, LinkedIn, BigDataWire, FinSMEs, GitHub)