Hetz Ventures and Valley Capital Partners lead seed round for platform that automates data engineering work blamed for stalling AI projects before productionUpriver, an AI-native data engineering platform, said Thursday it raised $14 million in seed funding to help companies automate the data infrastructure needed to move artificial intelligence projects into production.The San Francisco-based company said the round was led by Valley Capital Partners and Hetz Ventures, with participation from angel investors including New Relic founder Lew Cirne; Cyera founders Yotam Segev and Tamar Bar-Ilan; and Great Expectations founder Abe Gong.2 View gallery Upriver team (Photo: Omer HaCohen)Upriver said its platform is already used by companies including Unity and DMGT and has partnerships with data platforms including Databricks and Snowflake.The company says its technology connects to an organization’s full data stack, identifies and resolves data credibility issues and maintains data pipelines automatically. The goal, Upriver said, is to make the data used by AI systems more reliable, organized and trustworthy.Many enterprise AI projects have struggled to move beyond pilot programs because of poor data quality, fragmented systems and limited data availability. According to Gartner, 38% of technology leaders in April 2026 identified poor data quality or limited data availability as a direct cause of AI project failure. Gartner also found in January 2026 that at least half of generative AI projects had been abandoned after proof of concept, with poor data quality among the leading causes.Most large companies operate with fragmented infrastructure, including multiple customer relationship management systems, siloed databases and disconnected data pipelines developed over many years. Upriver says that without a reliable data foundation, AI systems cannot perform as expected.“As the pressure on enterprises to adopt AI intensifies, data teams are carrying the weight of that transformation,” said Steve O’Hara, founder and managing partner at Valley Capital Partners. “Every business unit now depends on them to make AI work, turning data engineering into one of the biggest bottlenecks inside the enterprise.”2 View gallery Upriver founders (Photo: Omer HaCohen)Ido Bronstein, Upriver’s co-founder and CEO, said companies are investing heavily in AI but often fail to see results because their data is not ready.“We built Upriver to take that burden off data teams entirely,” Bronstein said. “Instead of constantly sinking in repetitive technical work, data teams can lift their heads above water and focus on what moves the needle for the business.”Upriver said its platform combines a context engine that maps the structure of an organization’s data ecosystem with a reasoning engine made up of coordinated AI agents. The company says the system can find and resolve quality issues, maintain pipelines and create new datasets across complex enterprise data environments.The platform is also accessible through AI development tools including Claude and Cursor, allowing engineers to use Upriver within existing development environments.Uriel Knorovich, CEO of Nimble, said his company saw a 60% productivity increase after adopting Upriver.“We tried multiple AI tools, but none could handle the complexity of our environment,” Knorovich said. “Once we started using Upriver, it quickly understood our data stack and started to automate our operations.”Guy Fighel, a partner at Hetz Ventures, said AI initiatives have stalled because of weaknesses in the data layer beneath them.“Most platforms in this space sit on top of the stack,” Fighel said. “Upriver goes into it, and that’s the difference between cleaner dashboards and AI you can actually put into production.”Upriver said it will use the funding to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams, deepen product development and accelerate enterprise deployments.