Former iZettler’s set out to give the data game a Twirl, spin in $2.5 million in pre-seed round

Stockholm-based data infrastructure platform Twirl has raised $2.5 million in a pre-seed round. Founded in frustration with the status quo and born from experience and research, Twirl has earmarked the capital to move the needle, both in terms of the team size and onboarding of customers.

Twirl’s $2.5 million pre-seed round was led by Creandum with Cocoa Ventures and undisclosed angel investors participating.

Collectively, Rebecka Storm and Eric Hansander have worked on data projects for companies including iZettle, Better, Tink, Juni, and Ikea to name a few. Crossing paths at Swedish fintech iZettle (now a PayPal company), the seeds of what would one day become Twirl were scattered upon fertile earth.

But before we get there, let’s rewind the tape a bit and have a look at just what problem Twirl is aiming to solve. You don’t have to look too far to prove the proposition, “Every company today is a data company”. From fintech to hosptech to insurtech to martech, if it can be measured it can be managed.

And yet according to Twirl, in order for companies to spool up their data efforts, there’s a tremendous amount of engineering work that needs to happen behind the scenes befor the curtain can even rise, often leading to anemic at best ROI. 

Building upon their own experiences and looping in the feedback, and often frustrations of, hundreds of other data pros, Rebecka and Eric realised that while companies are oft to spend hours upon hours (and dollars upon dollars) “inventing” their own unique internal data tooling, these “unique” solutions often end up looking quite similar, if not practically identical to the next.

And herein lies the nucleus of Twirl - cut right to the chase, or rather, cut out the internal build, and suddenly the scales of ROI are massively shifted in one direction.

“So many companies have over-invested in their data stacks. It’s easy to see why: you start simple with easy-to-use tools, but as you run into their limits you keep having to add more tools and more code to glue them together,” says Storm. “And you still have to engineer your own solutions to fill the gaps. We built Twirl to solve all the common data engineering challenges that typically appear, once and for all, so you don’t have to.”

Putting a healthy dose of machine learning and AI behind their offer, Twirl says that customers can develop and test entire data pipelines from their laptops, seamlessly combining any programming language like SQL and Python and mixing batch and stream processing.

On the investment, Creandum Partner Sabina Wizander comments, “Twirl offers the data superpowers of companies like Spotify and Kry to any company, without needing a huge team of data engineers. In just a few months, the team has built a best-in-class platform and got customers up and running, and it’s hard to imagine better-positioned co-founders to build this.”