Polish startup Neptune snags $3 million to upgrade collaboration among data scientists

Neptune, the Polish data science startup, has raised $3 million for its data collaboration platform. The round is led by btov Partner’s Digital Tech Fund and Private Investor Network, along with TDJ Pitango and Rheingau Founders. A crew of angels also participated, data science experts including Marek Cygan, Grzegorz Świr- szcz, and Mateusz Malinowski.

The demand for data science (and scientists) is growing, but the market lags behind and the results of data science projects are still poor. According to Gartner, 85 percent of data science projects fail.

Neptune believes this low success rate is in large part due to a lack of fit-for-purpose collaboration tools. When founder and CEO Piotr Niedźwiedź moved fields from software engineering to data science, he was surprised by the “chaos,” the lack of synchronisation and centralisation. “As I was running my own business, I felt like I was losing valuable insights every day,” he said.

Enter Neptune. What Github is for software engineers, or HubSpot is for sales teams, Neptune is for data scientists: a lightweight collaboration tool that makes information transparent and keeps projects moving.

With the Polish software, data scientists can track the entire experimentation process, visualise results, and share insights. It works with both Python and R, integrates with all commonly used frameworks and tools like Keras, TensorFlow, Scikit Learn, and Pytorch, and can be used with any cloud or in-house infrastructure.

Neptune is btov’s first investment in Poland. Andreas Goeldi, partner of the firm’s Digital Tech Fund, explained the choice: “Data science is one of the most dynamic markets in IT today and yet still immature in terms of its commonly used toolset. As a former CTO with responsibility for a data science team, I know how challenging it is to enable an efficient and transparent collaboration process in this field. Neptune has an outstanding team with incredibly deep knowledge of the market and the customer problem. The company is perfectly positioned to solve this funda- mental problem and establish a global standard for data science collaboration.”

As for what the funding will go toward, Niedźwiedź added: “At this stage of the company's development, we're focusing on getting the product and value proposition right as we believe that data scientists are eager to get their hands on a tool that makes their daily life much easier. We want to give them the best user experience and set of features they need. This is what we are planning to focus on in the upcoming months.”