Harbr, a private data ecosystem platform for enterprise data managers, today emerged from stealth. The Harbr platform enables organizations to rapidly exchange, monetize and collaborate on data and models with their customers, suppliers and partners.

The Harbr team spent decades building and deploying data platforms in large enterprises and witnessed data consumers spending too much time acquiring data, making it useful and getting it to where it needed to be. Internal data was often locked inside data lakes and data warehouses that could never satisfy all the use cases in a typical enterprise. Meanwhile the external data opportunities to increase revenue, reduce cost and accelerate innovation were growing dramatically, but most enterprises were ill-equipped to take advantage of them.

“All large enterprises struggle to realize the value of their data, in part because every company needs data that starts or ends with their customers, suppliers and partners,” said Richard Winter, CEO, Wintercorp. “Perhaps the most critical issue now, is the speed at which companies can exchange and collaborate on data and models with other organizations. This will likely become even more critical in the coming years.”

Harbr provides private platforms to each customer where they can invite and manage all the organizations they want to interact with. A built-in data exchange converts digital content, including models, into ready-to-use data products with complete control over terms of use and the ability to restrict access to ‘on-platform only’, avoiding loss of ownership. Highly-secure collaboration environments enable people from different departments and organizations to virtually work together and build new data products that better meet their needs. Consumers can quickly build automated data pipelines, using a wide range of transfer mechanisms, for secure and auditable data distribution with no operational overhead.

“Data is increasingly critical to finding opportunities for growth and assessing a range of risks,” said Gabe Arnett, Senior Director at Moody’s Analytics. “We support our customers’ digital transformation and automation by applying the most relevant modern technologies, like Harbr’s data ecosystem platform, to deliver our data and expertise to help customers make better decisions.”

The Harbr team discovered early-on that platform ownership was critical to large enterprises, which also meant being multi-cloud and not tied to any single technology. Most large enterprises already have significant data ecosystems and recognise the huge strategic opportunity it presents. They want to fully own their platform and avoid risking vendor lock-in but also need to work with the technology choices of their customers, suppliers and partners, who could be using any cloud or platform. Harbr was built to be independent of underlying technologies, while still providing access to a wide range of tools and enabling effortless movement of data and models to any cloud.

“We chose to launch the company now because the platform enables virtual data collaboration meaning we’re in a unique position to help enterprises that are having to work remotely,” said Anthony Cosgrove, Co-Founder, Harbr. “The secure, on-demand environments bring data, tools and people together, so they can collaborate effectively without losing ownership of their data and models. This means people can continue to work even when it is not possible to be physically co-located, which has now become a critical priority for many enterprises.”

“Several data exchange services have recently been launched to help enterprises acquire and share data. At Harbr we’ve built a platform to fully solve this problem by combining aspects of a private data exchange with secure collaboration and automated, multi-cloud, data pipelines,” said Gary Butler, Co-Founder & CEO, Harbr. “This enables use cases across a wide range of verticals including financial services, logistics, insurance and consulting. Our customers now have platforms where they can rapidly exchange, monetize and collaborate on data and models with any stakeholder to reduce costs, deliver higher-value services and products and accelerate their business objectives.”

Harbr is backed by a range of investors including Chalfen Ventures and Boldstart Ventures. "I love backing teams that solve problems they have experienced first-hand. This team had the product, clarity and credibility to demonstrate early-on how big a difference they could make to customers in large markets,” said Mike Chalfen of Chalfen Ventures. "Harbr not only provides huge value to sophisticated market leaders, but will be the foundation for many data ecosystems through which billions of dollars of value will flow."

"Through our many discussions with Fortune 500 enterprises, it's clear that despite massive investment in data infrastructure, way too much time is still spent trying to access this data. Harbr is the first platform that helps enterprises easily share, monetize and collaborate on their data and models with any stakeholder on any cloud," said Ed Sim, Founder and Managing Partner at Boldstart Ventures. "We're thrilled to be partnered with Gary and Anthony as their deep experience building large scale data systems at companies like Greenplum and HSBC has Harbr poised to unlock a massive opportunity in the data economy."