100 mantas on board!

This week, we are celebrating at MANTA, we are 100 people strong now! It is hard to express my feelings but it is a mix of joy, happiness, excitement, proudness, and also that crazy feeling in my bones knowing that it is still just the beginning of an amazing journey. Things have changed so much since 2016/2017 when we started in the basement of a beautiful villa (with a terrible echo and super high humidity:)) in Prague as a spinoff from a great IT services company, Profinit. I could never have predicted that a few years later we would have 100 people and be ready to scale massively.

100 is an exciting number but this achievement is even more special because of the journey that led us here. When we started, there was no market for us. My thesis was (and still is) that we pay too much attention to data and its governance, quality, observability, privacy, ... but we totally ignore a major part of the picture - our data infrastructure and our data pipelines. As a Java developer, I had better tooling 20 years ago than data engineers have today. Which is even crazier once we realize that we actually spend most of our data engineering time by managing our data pipelines.

Today, I understand we arrived at the party a bit early but back then it was discouraging having discussions with leading industry analysts and experts and all I heard over and over "Not useful! No value! Maybe good for old undocumented systems in Cobol! ...". Things became more challenging when we were running out of money and I started my first round of fundraising. I met with hundreds and hundreds of people and every conversation was a rejection. I felt terrible. My shining beacon was my incredible wife. She supported me through everything and could not have continued without her. She was amazing, encouraging me every single day. I will never be able to thank her enough.

Luckily for us, several well known enterprises understood our value proposition and were eager to test our technology. We would not have survived without those early adopters.The brave data professionals who decided to give us a try, who fought very hard to get us through the procurement process and legal in their large organizations, and who were willing to pay to keep using our MANTA platform. Those companies helped us forge a path and MANTA has expanded from a business unit tool to an enterprise platform. It’s especially exciting to see our MANTA champions being promoted and growing professionally. That is the sweetest reward for their hard work and willingness to take a big risk.

100 strong is no guarantee of long term success but for me it is an amazing milestone on our journey. A journey that started a few short years ago with a simple vision to bring visibility back to our data infrastructure, to prevent incidents from happening, and to enable agile change management of our growing and rapidly evolving data environments. But there is so much ahead of us, so much adventure, market building, expanding to new locations, ... And most importantly setting new standards for healthy data engineering practices and supporting as many enterprises as possible!