Today, Swedish data quality startup Validio announced it has raised a $15m seed round led by Lakestar.

What does Validio do?

Validio was founded by Patrik Liu Tran, Urban Eriksson and Oliver Molander in 2019, and helps data-driven companies eliminate bad data with end-to-end data quality monitoring and validation in data warehouses and real-time streams.

Why does it matter:

Data has become key for companies to understand and analyse underlying trends, sales and growth. According to Validio, one issue is that data-driven companies sometimes use bad data.

“More data isn’t necessarily the magical asset companies often think it is. Having good data trumps more data in most cases. Within five years, every company that collects data will need to have an end-to-end data quality solution in place if they want to use the data for business-critical decisions,” says the CEO Patrik Liu Tran.

Validio’s investors:

• Swiss VC Lakestar led the round with participation from Swedish seed VC J12.
• Angel investors include football legend Zlatan Ibrahimović as well as a number of data whizzes like Denise Persson (CMO at Snowflake), Kevin Ryan (cofounder of MongoDB), Emil Eifrem (cofounder of Neo4j) and Mehdi Ghissassi (head of product at DeepMind), as well as Kim Fai Kok and Dara Gill (angel collective Framtid).

Sifted take:

That Validio has been able to attract customers including startups like Budbee, Babyshop and Tibber is a sign that it is probably solving an issue that’s key for companies to succeed — especially when the need for data analysis is growing.

And although Zlatan is a great name to have for media coverage, he has also invested in quite a few startups via his company Unknown AB. Perhaps more promising for Validio though is the fact that it has attracted people with years of experience in data analytics companies as angel investors.

Mimi Billing is Sifted’s Nordic correspondent. She also covers healthtech, and tweets from @MimiBilling