We founded Synq in 2022 with the thesis that the future of data teams would be at the center of business-critical operations, creating a need for them to operate more like engineers. Going into 2023, we worked with a handful of design partners that helped shape the early version of Synq. Since then, we’ve onboarded dozens of teams, have hundreds of users on the platform, and process millions of data assets daily.

2023 at a glance

We’ve been overwhelmed by the engagement from our earlier customers–from hundreds of calls sharing product feedback to thousands of message exchanges in our shared Slack channels. As we close out 2023, we want to thank our customers–especially those early adopters who took a bet on us.

Business-critical data teams are becoming the norm

We have spoken with hundreds of data leaders, and by far, the most significant theme has been the move towards data teams owning business-critical applications. A few years ago, data teams were predominantly expected to support reporting and business intelligence use cases. Today, leading data teams are central to business-critical applications such as ML models and user-facing analytics products.

“We’re allocating a $50 million/year ad budget based on automated CLTV predictions from the data warehouse” - European eCommerce

The shift to supporting business-critical applications has significantly changed expectations for data teams. We’ve seen this first-hand among our customers, spanning fintechs, logistics and mobility scaleups, top B2B companies, and eCommerce platforms. For example, an eCommerce company has ML models running on the data warehouse, and one day of data downtime can cost more than $100,000. One fintech is automating its regulatory reporting to be based on the data warehouse, and data issues can lead to the company getting sizeable fines from regulators. And a marketplace scaleup has built user-facing analytics powered by the data warehouse to provide customers with near-real-time recommendations in their customer portal.

By seeing this impact on companies, we’re firm believers that the trend of data teams owning business-critical applications will continue–and that we’ve only scratched the surface and will continue to see the data warehouse instrumented as the control center of operations for the best companies.

Synq–from dbt-centric error management to end-end data reliability platform

By the end of 2022, our original product had a simple premise: to help data teams using dbt manage when things go wrong–from ownership to alerting and debugging.

But this was just the beginning, and throughout 2023, we’ve worked tirelessly to deliver on our vision to create an end-end reliability platform for teams owning business-critical data.

Today, our platform spans the core components we believe data teams need to deliver reliable data products.

• Detection–proactively detect issues with advanced self-learning anomaly monitors.
• Data products–manage important data as products by connecting dependencies, unifying ownership management, and setting SLAs.
• Incident management–triage, prioritize, and resolve data issues, and keep an audit log of all issues.
• SLA & analytics–get an overview of quality across data products, teams, and assets to improve systematically.

We’ve also invested heavily in extending our ability to integrate across the stack and built support for Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, ClickHouse, Postgres, and Airflow.

As we continue to execute our product vision, we’ve been particularly excited about ways to solve customer problems due to the flexibility we’ve built into our product from day one. For example, one customer is using Synq to run tailored monitors against specific customer segments with bespoke time series conditions, and another customer is being served insights from our metadata on ClickHouse about the usage of data assets as part of a data cleanup project.

These use cases accumulate, and we are frequently delighted by how our customers use Synq to solve a broader range of problems within their data stack.

“Synq lets us see all errors in one place and quickly assess the impact across thousands of data models and dashboards with automated lineage from dbt to Looker. As a result, we discovered business-critical issues and fixed scheduling bugs we’d otherwise have missed.” – Ilmari, Analytics Engineer at Typeform.

So, what’s in store for 2024? We’re doubling down on our detection engine to (1) detect the broadest possible range of data issues and (2) make the placement of monitors as seamless as possible to prevent alert overload while catching issues with a high level of accuracy. We’ve heard feedback from dozens of data teams that they need metrics to communicate reliability and improve data quality in line with growing business expectations. We’re investing in more comprehensive analytics tailored around existing concepts such as data products and ownership.

Finally, some issues are better detected during development, and we will build new features to extend our engine to pre-production use cases.

Growing with our customers

Throughout 2023, we’ve gone from working with a handful of design partners to supporting business-critical data teams in their daily workflows at billion-dollar scaleups and public companies. We’re grateful for the early customers who took a bet on us. We’ve spent hundreds of hours together on calls, exchanged thousands of Slack messages, and jumped on jets more than 20 times to spend time in person.

Some of our customers

You can read more about some of these insights accumulated in the 20 blog posts we’ve written in 2023 and on our customer stories page.

Last but not least, we doubled the size of the Synq team and now have people across Denmark, Slovenia, Poland, Spain, the UK, France, Austria, and the Chezh Republic. Most recently, we’ve laid the foundations for the GTM team led by Stephen Reidy.

See you in 2024!

The Synq team