Generative AI startup Betterdata raises US$1.7 million in oversubscribed seed round

PROGRAMMABLE synthetic data company Betterdata has raised US$1.7 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by venture capital (VC) firm Investible.

The round included participation from global investment firm Franklin Templeton, VC firms Xcel Next and Entrepreneur First, information technology and data services firm Bon Auxilium, the Singapore University of Technology and Design, startup incubator Tenity, and innovation platform Plug and Play, said the startup on Friday (Apr 21).

The seed funding will be used to publicly launch Betterdata’s product and enhance its programmable synthetic data technology stack.

This includes support for single-table, multi-table and time-series datasets, and the hiring of sales and marketing positions for business development as the company scales.

Founded in 2021 by chief executive officer Uzair Javaid and chief technologist Kevin Yee, Singapore-based Betterdata aims to make data sharing faster and more secure, amid increasing data protection regulations worldwide and user awareness on privacy.

The startup converts limited real data into limitless synthetic data, which the company highlighted as faster and safer than traditional data-sharing methods that use data anonymisation to destroy information and ensure privacy.

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It is through this method that Betterdata “solves one of the biggest issues” the artificial intelligence (AI) industry is facing today: the lack of high-quality data that also meets privacy requirements, said Khairu Rejal, principal at Investible.

“Through its powerful platform, Betterdata generates synthetic data that mimics real-world data without compromising quality and privacy, helping businesses meet global compliance and privacy laws at scale,” he added.

Xcel Next founding partner K Yu also noted that the startup’s generative AI (GenAI) models will be essential in many business verticals as GenAI systems become mainstream.

The startup, which was incubated at the Asian Institute of Digital Finance at the National University of Singapore, plans to expand across the Asia-Pacific region over the next one to two years.