data.world Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

data.world did not generate its first dollar of revenue until 2018, having raised more than $50 million in capital before that milestone. Brett Hurt declined to disclose current annual recurring revenue during the April 2023 interview, saying the figure would provide competitive intelligence.

data.world operates a two-sided model. The free community side had more than 2.1 million members as of April 2023, up from a figure of more than 1.6 million cited in a 2022 TechCrunch article. Hurt confirmed the 2.1 million figure and clarified these are users contributing to the open data community, not paid seats.

On the paid enterprise side, Hurt declined to disclose total customer count or average selling price, citing competitive sensitivity. He described the pricing structure as a platform fee plus a per-user charge above that threshold, with upsells driven primarily by user expansion. One large unnamed global service firm has 31,000 paid users on data.world. That same firm had previously attempted to deploy Collibra and never exceeded 12 users before abandoning the effort. Hurt said data.world is becoming the most deployed data tool at its enterprise customers, though he did not provide a broader customer count to support that claim.

data.world charges enterprise customers on a platform basis with additional per-user fees above the platform tier. Upsell motion is driven by user expansion within existing accounts. The company does not disclose average selling price or average revenue per user.

The company has two distinct business units: a free open-data community and a paid enterprise data catalog. Hurt described the free side as a public-benefit utility and the paid side as a private data catalog for enterprise customers, with the two sides sharing the same underlying knowledge graph technology. Profitability was not discussed in the interview. Gross margin, churn, net revenue retention, CAC, LTV, and burn rate were not disclosed.

data.world had approximately 150 employees as of April 2023. Of that total, roughly one-third, or approximately 50 people, work in engineering. Hurt noted that generative AI is increasing engineering team efficiency and that the company is investing heavily in the technology both internally and as a product capability, given that data.world's knowledge graph architecture is well suited to large language model applications.