YZR, the French start-up that uses AI to normalize data, has raised $12m in the Series A round co-led by Nauta Capital and Orange Ventures. Supported by 50 Partners for 2 years and winner of the Galion Booster award in 2020, the next step in their expansion plans is to be a dominant player in the US markets.
YZR have created a no-code, plug-and-play, data preparation platform that makes it easier, better, and faster to normalise and prepare data for downstream ingestion. Their AI-powered standardisation, labelling, and context-understanding software has in-depth sector specific semantic knowledge to quickly enable business units to draw value from it.
Despite the widespread impact of the COVID-19 crisis, the start-up has managed to become one of the most promising French start-ups and in 2020, they were recipients of the prestigious Galion Booster award.
Sébastien Garcin, YZR President explains: “This fundraising confirms that our vision is the right one: there’s always more tools and more algorithms to make data, but yet no solution that would allow these tools to communicate with each other. The times when data scientists would take long hours everyday to normalize data are over.”
Jean-Philippe Poisson, YZR General Manager said: “This fundraising campaign is a huge success, and we are extremely proud of it. Thanks to our new partners Nauta Capital and Orange Ventures, we have the means for our global ambitions. We are now preparing for a successful entry into the US market.”
YZR previously raised more than $2m in seed funding in 2021 thanks to major French tech investors such as Frédéric Mazzella (Blablacar), Laurent Ritter (Voodoo) and Jean-Baptiste Rudelle (Critéo). Since then, they have onboarded several notable brands such as Monoprix, Clear Channel, Aramis Auto and BNP Paribas. “The team’s experience, the relevance of its solution, and the depth of the market quickly convinced us of YZR’s strong potential.” states Jérôme Masurel, 50 Partners CEO.
Due to its rapid growth, YZR wants the fresh capital injection to scale-up its operations, improve its product, specifically in health and consumer data, and make strategic key hires. The start-up also wants to widen its global reach by penetrating both European and US markets, with plans to set up a US subsidiary.
For Nauta Capital this will be their first investment in a French start-up whilst for Orange Ventures, YZR will be one of the handful of Series A rounds they have backed.
Pratima Aiyagari, Nauta Capital Venture Partner said: “As new data streams are being constantly generated by all processes it’s ever more important to normalize the data to a common standard before we can analyze and gather business critical information from it. Different business entities within an organization need a common data format so they can all speak the same language and prep the data for business analysis. We are happy to partner with YZR in this next phase of growth as the company continues to expand its technical offerings and geographic presence.”
Jérôme Berger, Orange Ventures President and Managing Partner added: “We are eager to invest in YZR, whose mission will help us to multiply the capacities of use of data – a highly strategic sector to which we at Oranges Ventures attach great importance. It is also a manifestation of our full confidence in French Tech, whose talent YZR will help to shine around the world.”
Beyond its main mission, YZR pursues strong social ambitions to make the tech sector more diverse and inclusive. In partnership with 50inTech, YZR revealed its Gender Parity Score on International Women’s Day. By maintaining gender and real wage equality as well as career development opportunities, it adopts a workplace culture where employees will be valued and respected.
About YZR:
YZR is a smart data normalization platform, delivered as a SaaS (Software as a Service). Founded in Paris by Sébastien Garcin et Jean-Philippe Poisson, the start-up has started its business operations in September 2019. YZR aims, thanks to AI, to simplify the work of 54 Million data workers in the world who are currently manually standardizing data using spreadsheets. YZR thus provides its solution to retail and e-commerce leaders such as Monoprix or La Redoute to automatically standardize heterogeneous product data from their suppliers. This more qualitative and granular data is then used to create next-generation pricing or customer loyalty policies. Now in high-speed growth, YZR is pursuing its activities while taking care of promoting an inclusive vision of the tech sector, specifically concerning its recruitment policy.
Nauta Capital:
Nauta Capital is a Pan-European Venture Capital firm investing in early-stage technology companies, with offices in London, Barcelona and Berlin. With over half a billion assets under management and a team of 24 people, Nauta Capital is one of Europe’s largest B2B focused VCs. As a sector-agnostic investor, Nauta’s main areas of interest include B2B SaaS solutions with strong network effects, vertically focused enterprise tech transforming large industries as well as those leveraging deep-tech applications to solve challenges faced by large enterprises. Nauta has led investments in more than 60 companies including Brandwatch, HappySignals, Marfeel, Nextail, Emjoy, zenloop, Mercaux, Holded, Onna, MishiPay, and Smart Protection. Find out more at www.nautacapital.com.
Orange Ventures:
With a 350 million euros allocation, Orange Ventures is dedicated to investments in innovative startups in areas of strategic interest of Orange (Networks & IT, Digital Enterprise, Cybersecurity, and Fintech) and beyond (Consumer platforms, E -gaming, Edtech, Health etc). Orange Ventures also deploys initiatives dedicated to the Africa and Middle East region. Supported by the Orange group, and made up of a team of 20 people, Orange Ventures offers startups in which it invests access to the Group’s expertise and the possibility of setting up synergies with its many business units and its 256 million customers in 26 countries.
50 Partners:
50 Partners is one of the main European accelerators founded in 2012 around figures from the French entrepreneurial world (Blablacar, LeBonCoin, ShowRoomPrivé…) aiming to support the best young innovative companies in the digital, impact and health sectors. For 10 years, 50 Partners have supported projects in various sectors of innovation: Fintech, Deeptech, IA, Cyber-security. Over these years, 50 Partners has brought together an ecosystem of investors and experts enabling the emergence of solutions for the world of tomorrow.
LeFonds by French Founders:
LeFonds is an early-stage venture partner focused on bringing solid community power to support global ambition. It was created in 2021 to sport the development of young innovative start-ups that wish to establish themselves internationally, notably in the US. LeFonds provides its portfolio companies with an incomparable opportunity to develop faster and wiser businesses worldwide thanks to the powerful FrenchFounders network, which brings together more than 4,000 francophone members and more than 250 investors worldwide.
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