Similarity Systems
secures $7 million funding to accelerate USA sales growth and enhance
its ATHANOR™ Data Quality solution
Dublin, Ireland -- February 15, 2005 -- Similarity
Systems, which develops and markets the leading Data Quality solution
ATHANOR, has closed a $7 million (€5.5 million) funding round
led by Trinity Venture Capital. Existing investors including Delta
Partners and a number of private investors also participated in this
Series B investment. Similarity Systems intends to use the funds to
further evolve its products and expand its international sales and
marketing initiatives. Similarity Systems was advised by Francis Hackett
of O’Donnell Sweeney for the round.
“The traction we’ve generated from enterprise customers
and the world-wide growth in the market for Data Quality solutions have
enabled us to mold Similarity Systems into the leading Data Quality company
it is today,”
said Garry Moroney, chief executive officer, Similarity Systems.
“This latest injection of funds provides us with the backing we
need to expand sales and business development initiatives in the consumer
goods and finance sectors in North America, where we see a massive untapped
market for our business-focused Data Quality solution.”
With its unique business-focused approach to solving the pervasive problem
of poor Data Quality, Similarity Systems has attracted significant numbers
of Global 2000 customers in the USA, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
Similarity Systems’ ATHANOR is the only suite of Data Quality products
that enables business knowledge workers to take control of enterprise-wide
data cleansing initiatives. ATHANOR profiles, standardizes, cleanses
and matches all data types, including customer name and address, product,
inventory and materials master data. Coupled with the Similarity Systems
Data Quality management methodology (or any other quality management
methodology such as Six Sigma), ATHANOR enables organizations to tackle
Data Quality one system at a time, with a distributed solution that also
provides centralized control, management and reporting to enterprise-wide
Data Quality standards.
Trinity Venture Capital has been instrumental in supporting a number
of European Software companies’ expansion in the USA and globally.
Similarity Systems opened its second USA office in New York City in January
2005. The company is currently expanding its sales and support team in
the USA and is investing heavily in product development.
“In ATHANOR Similarity Systems has created a unique solution that
positions the company to fulfill the expanding Data Quality needs of
global enterprises,” said Rory Quirke, investment director, Trinity
Venture Capital. “The Data Quality market is expected to grow between
20 and 30 percent per year between now and 2007. With ATHANOR’s
distinct business-focused methodology we believe Similarity Systems is
poised to profit from this expansion.”
Poor Data Quality costs businesses vast amounts of money. Defective
data leads to breakdowns in the supply chain, poor business decisions
and inferior customer relationship management. It also hampers efforts
to meet regulatory and compliance responsibilities. By providing solutions
to generate, measure and maintain high quality data, Similarity Systems
enables data owners to very quickly achieve important benefits, including
cost savings, better decision making, improved customer service and more
streamlined supply chain management.
Similarity Systems’ ATHANOR is an integrated Data Quality solution
that includes profiling, standardizing, matching, cleansing, and data
enrichment functionality in one product. ATHANOR is extensively deployed
in financial institutions faced with improving Data Quality as part of
their regulatory compliance efforts, as well as in consumer goods manufacturers
struggling with internal data alignment, global data synchronization
and streamlining of supply chains. These organizations have a diversity
of data in addition to customer name and address information, including
product, material, inventory, asset and vendor data.
ATHANOR offers an easy-to-use workbench environment for managing Data
Quality across the enterprise. The product has more than forty configurable
Data Quality building blocks or components available on the desktop.
The component approach empowers data owners to construct complex Data
Quality rules without resorting to low-level coding. The solution has
redefined who tackles Data Quality problems within global organizations,
taking them out of the hands of IT departments and enabling business
data owners to address data accuracy, completeness and integrity problems
across multiple enterprise applications.
The latest edition of the ATHANOR Data Quality solution, version 2.11,
is due to ship later this month. ATHANOR 2.11 includes new SAP connectors,
enhancing the product’s enterprise applications connectivity, and
a new Address Validation component. The Address Validation component
offers out-of-the-box address validation for 15 countries including the
UK, USA, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, France, Australia, Luxembourg and
Singapore as well as geocoding for the USA and UK.
About Trinity Venture Capital
Trinity Venture Capital (www.tvc.com) provides venture capital and proven
commercial expertise to early- and growth-stage technology companies.
To date it has made 22 investments, backing companies in sectors such
as wireless/communications, enterprise software and computer animation.
Trinity Venture Capital is part of the Reihill Venture Capital Group,
which has over €250m under management.
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