Benjamin Segal

Benjamin Segal is co-founder and chief executive of Matia, a data operations company headquartered in Miami, Florida, that he started in 2023 with his brother Geva Segal, its chief technology officer. Before Matia he was chief of staff and head of data at Pangaea, a consumer goods company, where he watched his engineers spend their days repairing data pipelines, the jobs that move data between a company’s systems.

Running data at Pangaea

In Matia’s founding post, he wrote that his data engineers at Pangaea “were spending most of their time building data pipelines, maintaining these pipelines, and fixing errors and outages.” Each new tool brought in to help added integration work of its own. In a Refresh Miami interview he described the pressure of real-time shipping decisions: “When you do Amazon Prime all over the world,” he said, “we had a large amount of issues with data because we had to make decisions real time, in a matter of milliseconds.” He moved to Miami in 2020.

Starting Matia with his brother

Geva Segal was leading an engineering team at Synamedia focused on cybersecurity, and the brothers talked about their data problems every week. “We talked to 36 data leaders in 20 days,” Benjamin wrote, and each of them said they ran several tools. The name comes from the Greek word for eyes. Matia combines ingestion, reverse ETL, observability and a data catalog, and its customers include Ramp and Lemonade.

Segal now describes the next step as “the Cursor for data engineers,” an AI assistant that helps build pipelines and catch anomalies. He also puts weight on support. “Today we have a sub five minute response time for customers,” he told Refresh Miami. Matia has about 40 employees across Israel and the United States, according to Calcalist.