Dremio raises a $70M Series C and Aerospike Cloud launches, as data companies maintain their momentum
Dremio, the company behind the open source Apache Arrow and Gandiva projects, and a commercial data lake engine/data virtualization platform based on both, is this morning announcing it has raised $70M in a series C funding round. NoSQL player Aerospike, meanwhile, launched its Aerospike Cloud offering on Tuesday. Not bad for week in which Coronavirus and COVID-19 have raged on.
Also read:
- Startup Dremio emerges from stealth, launches memory-based BI query engine
- Dremio 3.0 adds catalog, containers, enterprise features
- Open source "Gandiva" project wants to unblock analytics
We're in the money
Dremio's new funding round was led by Insight Partners and features participation from investors in earlier rounds, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners , and Cisco Investments. It comes on the heels of a year in which Dremio says it grew annual recurring revenue (ARR) over 3.5x. Lightspeed seems duly impressed by the momentum of the data lake analytics market and the role of Dremio's platform within it: "Dremio addresses the key challenges enterprises face with data moving to the cloud at rapidly increasing volumes," said Teddie Wardi, managing director at Insight Partners.
I spoke with CEO Billy Bosworth, who took the helm at Dremio just last month, after serving eight and a half years as CEO at DataStax. He explained to me that the major area of investment for the new funding will be engineering. Specifically, Bosworth said, enhancing ease-of-use, and adding automation that will reduce time-to-value for Dremio customers, will be areas of key focus.
Bright side
Despite the coronavirus' impact on the economy and employment levels, Dremio isn't laying anyone off. Quite the opposite, in fact, with the new funding, Dremio is hiring new team members in every area of the company other than account managers, and even those roles will be tended to once the virus' period of disruption has lapsed.
Dremio's platform delivers in-memory-accelerated querying and a self-service semantic layer directly against data lake storage. Supported storage platforms include Amazon Web Services' Simple Storage Service (S3), Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS), and on-premises Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) implementations.
Aerospike reaches for the cloud
Meanwhile, Aerospike, a NoSQL vendor focused on real-time applications, announced the launch of its cloud offeirng earlier this week.
Also read: Aerospike, ThoughtSpot, Alteryx and AI-inspired integration
While deployment of Aerospike's platform to the public cloud was possible before, Aerospike Cloud will give customers all the building blocks needed to deploy it in a more Database as a Service (DBaaS)-like fashion.
Aerospike Cloud is geared towards Cloud Native Computing Foundation standards and is enabled by the now-nearly-ubiquitous Kubernetes (K8s) container orchestration platform. Specifically, it includes a custom K8s Operator for Aerospike, Helm charts, and integration with Prometheus and Grafana. Aerospike Founder and Chief Product Officer Srini Srinivasan told me that Aerospike Cloud's architecture and design was informed by extensive work the company did with customers who deployed to the standard Aerospike offering to the cloud on their own.
Initially, the Areospike Cloud will be geared to Google Cloud and, specifically, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Srinivasan said that Aerospike and Google Cloud share a number of customers, so starting with GKE made the most sense. But since the very ethos of K8s is portability, expansion onto Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and AWS' Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) seems like a not-huge stretch. Aerospike Cloud will be available in the second quarter of this year.
Virus, shmirus!
With a Q2 launch, it would seem that Aerospike will be making productive of the next three months, in readying its cloud offering. And Aerospike's Virtual Summit will take place from May 12-14, in lieu of the company's annual live event.
For companies in other industries, the March-May 2020 period may be one of sub-optimal productivity. But most tech companies have the work-from-home/distributed workforce thing down pat. And whether it's raising a new funding round, or launching a core platform cloud offering, even a global lockdown isn't going to stop data companies from innovating and getting stuff done.