Paris, London, 18th of March, 2022 - YZR, the French start-up that uses AI to normalize data, has raised $12m in the Series A round co-led by Nauta Capital and Orange Ventures. Supported by 50 Partners for 2 years and winner of the Galion Booster award in 2020, the next step in their expansion plans is to be a dominant player in the US markets.

YZR have created a no-code, plug-and-play, data preparation platform that makes it easier, better, and faster to normalise and prepare data for downstream ingestion. Their AI-powered standardisation, labelling, and context-understanding software has in-depth sector specific semantic knowledge to quickly enable business units to draw value from it.

Despite the widespread impact of the COVID-19 crisis, the start-up has managed to become one of the most promising French start-ups and in 2020, they were recipients of the prestigious Galion Booster award.

Sébastien Garcin, YZR President explains: “This fundraising confirms that our vision is the right one: there’s always more tools and more algorithms to make data, but yet no solution that would allow these tools to communicate with each other. The times when data scientists would take long hours everyday to normalize data are over.”

Jean-Philippe Poisson, YZR General Manager said: “This fundraising campaign is a huge success, and we are extremely proud of it. Thanks to our new partners Nauta Capital and Orange Ventures, we have the means for our global ambitions. We are now preparing for a successful entry into the US market.”

YZR previously raised more than $2m in seed funding in 2021 thanks to major French tech investors such as Frédéric Mazzella (Blablacar), Laurent Ritter (Voodoo) and Jean-Baptiste Rudelle (Critéo). Since then, they have onboarded several notable brands such as Monoprix, Clear Channel, Aramis Auto and BNP Paribas. “The team’s experience, the relevance of its solution, and the depth of the market quickly convinced us of YZR’s strong potential.” states Jérôme Masurel, 50 Partners CEO.

Due to its rapid growth, YZR wants the fresh capital injection to scale-up its operations, improve its product, specifically in health and consumer data, and make strategic key hires. The start-up also wants to widen its global reach by penetrating both European and US markets, with plans to set up a US subsidiary.For Nauta Capital this will be their first investment in a French start-up whilst for Orange Ventures, YZR will be one of the handful of Series A rounds they have backed.

Pratima Aiyagari, Nauta Capital Venture Partner said: “As new data streams are being constantly generated by all processes it’s ever more important to normalize the data to a common standard before we can analyze and gather business critical information from it. Different business entities within an organization need a common data format so they can all speak the same language and prep the data for business analysis.  We are happy to partner with YZR in this next phase of growth as the company continues to expand its technical offerings and geographic presence.”

Jérôme Berger, Orange Ventures President and Managing Partner added: “We are eager to invest in YZR, whose mission will help us to multiply the capacities of use of data - a highly strategic sector to which we at Oranges Ventures attach great importance. It is also a manifestation of our full confidence in French Tech, whose talent YZR will help to shine around the world.”

Beyond its main mission, YZR pursues strong social ambitions to make the tech sector more diverse and inclusive. In partnership with 50inTech, YZR revealed its Gender Parity Score on International Women’s Day. By maintaining gender and real wage equality as well as career development opportunities, it adopts a workplace culture where employees will be valued and respected.‍