- The company raised $25M in a financing round which was led by Scale Venture Partners.
- Upsolver plans to add the ability to replicate databases into data lakes while keeping them updated.
Introduction:
This morning the company announced that it raised $25 million in financing led by Scale Venture Partners. The company also launched a free Community Edition of its product and said that the funds will be used to recruit engineers and scale its go-to-market efforts. Enterprises are quickly turning to cloud adoption. According to a Deloitte survey, 68% of CIOs ranked migrating to the cloud are their top IT spending driver in 2020. But the development of an analytics-ready cloud data lake can come down to plain complex and expensive.
What does Statistics say:
A recently published Statista report found that about 83% of cloud practitioners considered security, managing cloud spend, governance, and a lack of resources to be the biggest barriers to entry. Upsolver develops software that primes the data lakes for analytics, according to CEO Ori Rafael. Rafael and Yoni Rini found the company in 2014. The company’s platform provides a visual structured query language interface and automatic data optimization, tuning, and orchestration.
Statement from the CEO: .
“We wanted to store data affordably in the cloud without analytics vendor lock-in,” Rafael said. “Unfortunately, what used to take three hours using SQL turned into 30 days of hand-coding and complex Spark configuration. We created Upsolver to bridge this gap between raw cloud data and analytics-ready data.”
The product allows the organizations to perform analytics using a collection of query engines and data systems. These include PrestoDB, Trino, Athena, Snowflake, Redshift, Synapse Analytics, Splunk, and Elastic. The eventual goal is to replace the customer’s code-heavy approach with Upsolver’s compute layer. This computer layer remains between the customers’ cloud storage and the tools, engines, and apps of their preference.
“Upsolver is a critical component for successfully implementing a cloud data lake for analytics, which is a popular approach due to the affordability that data lakes provide. We complement cloud data warehouses, search engines, and other purpose-built data stores as well,” Rafael said. “Upsolver is often used to output prepared data to those platforms making data available to standalone query engines. Data engineers use Upsolver’s visual user interface to build any data transformations and preparation tasks. This generates SQL that the data engineer can also directly edit to fine-tune the processing.”
The company soon plans to add the ability to replicate databases into data lakes while keeping them updated. Recently the platform launched on Azure and will be available in a community edition delivering “free forever” capabilities. This edition will be available to smaller workloads that provide a proving ground for companies who may work with Upsolver on larger use cases.
How has the company claimed its benefits?
Scale partner Ariel Tseitlin affirms that the company benefits from having a foot in two fast-growing markets: big data analytics and data lakes. The Global data Lake market size has a value of $7.6 billion in 2019 according to Grand View Research. In 2017 Forbes reported that about 50% of companies have adopted Big Data analytics with a large portion that opts to run a workload in the cloud.
“Monolithic analytics platforms are a thing of the past. Today’s organizations require a variety of analytics tools to fully capitalize on their data,” Tseitlin said in a press release. “Data lakes originally promised this variety and openness but also required a large, ongoing investment in engineering. Upsolver eliminates this trade-off.”
Thirty-employee Upsolver says that revenue tripled by 2020 as brands including Cox Automotive, Wix, and AppsFlyer joined its customer base. Existing investors like Vertex Ventures US, Wing Venture Capital, and JVP also participated in Upsolver’s series B round. It almost reached a value of $13 million in series A which brought the company’s total $42 million.
