Harbr emerges from stealth to help build online data marketplaces

Harbr co-founder Anthony Cosgrove has been working with data for over 15 years, so he has an inkling of some of the problems associated with pulling data together in a way that makes it easy for others to consume, whether internally or externally. Like many entrepreneurs before him, he decided to start a company to solve that problem, and today it came out of stealth.

Cosgrove explained that in his experience, data platforms of the past had several problems. “They were too slow. They were too expensive and too risky, and when you got the data you then ended up working in a silo with really no repeatability of anything that you did for anybody else in your organization,” he explained.

Cosgrove started Harbr because he saw a dearth of tools to help with these issues. “We wanted to create an environment where organizations could share their data, collaborate on that data and create new versions of that data that were really optimized for very specific use cases,” he said.

For now, the company is concentrating on large data vendors, helping them package and monetize the data they produce as a business more efficiently, but Cosgrove sees a time where he could be helping other firms that produce data as a byproduct of conducting business to monetize that data more easily.

He says these big data businesses generally lack the agility to package data in ways that make sense for each customer, and his company’s product should help solve that. “They’re able to start working directly with their customers to move away from kind of sending data to actually selling services, models or insights, which is what customers really want,” he said.

One other unique aspect of the tool is that it is a true platform, meaning that you are not just restricted to the data in your system. You can pull together other data sources as well, and that could make for even more interesting ways to package the data for customers.

The company launched in London in 2017 and spent some time building the product. It recently opened offices in the United States and currently has 30 employees divided between the two locations. It has raised $6.5 million in seed capital led by Boldstart Ventures .