Berlin’s Tilo raises seed round to tackle unstructured data sets with a serverless platform

As is commonly the case, data sets used inside companies almost always come from diverse sources and in different, unstructured formats. Connecting them up can lead to a very large headache. But if it can be done, there are all sorts of benefits, especially in finance, such as fraud detection, KYC/AML checks etc. This is a problem particularly faced by financial firms, but it could also be useful in the areas of COVID contact tracing or general business intelligence.

The main platforms used at this point include Neo4j, Senzing or Neptune from AWS. Alternatively, companies try to build their own solutions using Elasticsearch. But it remains a big problem to solve.

Now a new Berlin startup, which has tested its theories after being spun out from a larger corporate, is poised to tackle this thorny problem.

Tilo’s data infrastructure tool TiloRes says it helps companies match data points from different sources and formats, by being both serverless and doing it in near real-time and at scale, claims the company.

Tilo has now raised €1,200,000 in pre-seed funding led by European VC Peak Capital (which put in €640,000). The funding round was joined by Berlin-based Tiny VC (Philipp Moehring), First Momentum Ventures, Enduring Ventures and angel investors, including the founder of Algolia and the former CMO of Contentful, to name a few.

Peak’s investments include global auction marketplace Catawiki, headless content management system GraphCMS and omnichannel communications platform Trengo.

As well as applications for KYC/AML, Tilo plans to offer its solution for free to anybody working in COVID contact tracing.

Founded in November 2021, Tilo has started pilot projects together with corporates and startups. As its business model, Tilo charges a license fee based on the volume of data companies are processing through TiloRes. Because it’s serverless, the costs scale with the usage, making it cheaper than server-based solutions.

The market Tilo is taking on is large, and worth approximately $65 billion, according to Gartner.

Steven Renwick, Tilo CEO, said: “Our biggest advantage is that searching, matching and evaluating data (e.g. when checking for fraudulent behaviour in an online payment process) happens in near real time, no matter how much data is added, or how complicated the entities become. This is important for modern needs, which nearly always demand real-time response rates.”

Tilo’s founding team, Renwick (CEO), Hendrik Nehnes (CTO), and Stefan Berkner (chief development officer), were formerly the technology team at Regis24, a German consumer credit bureau. However, Regis24 agreed to spin out their solution and take a strategic stake in the startup.

Madeline Lawrence, head of DACH Peak commented: “To be really honest, I didn’t grasp what Tilo was solving at first. Then I realized: we struggle with data matching ourselves. If CRM duplicates and spelling differences cause us such a headache, imagine the pain when the stakes are higher, the need is real-time, and the data in question is an order of magnitude larger.”