The AI-powered data analytics platform Foundational has just announced $8 million in seed funding and the general availability of its platform, which is designed to enable developers to find and fix data issues before code containing it is deployed. 

The funding round was led by Viola Ventures and Gradient, and Asymmetric Venture Partners and executives from Datadog, Intuit, Meta, Wiz, and more also participated in the round.

It will use the new funding to continue developing its technology and adding new features to the platform. 

“It has become a remarkably difficult task for developers to confirm crucial questions like, ‘What dashboards will this schema change affect?,’ ‘Can I deploy this code change safely?’ or ‘What data pipelines do we have that are not working?’” said Alon Nafta, CEO and co-founder of Foundational. “The inability to validate simple code changes, and the lack of visibility and controls, and the time-consuming nature of data engineering create a dramatic bottleneck on innovation and adoption of data and AI.”

Zvika Orron, general partner at Viola Ventures, added: “Data is exploding everywhere, and organizations that manage data properly will become the big winners. Software engineering has been able to scale tremendously through the use of code analysis, CI/CD and SDLC, and Foundational is now introducing these to data. We’re excited to support the journey of this exceptional team as they transform how companies manage data at scale.”