A house emerged last year with a cloud data lake product built on top of open source Apache Hudi project. The startup aims to act as an integration layer to move data between different repositories, rather than competing directly with larger data lake providers like Snowflake and Databricks.
Today the company announced a $25 million Series A.
Company founder and CEO Vinoth Chandar came up with the idea for Hudi while he was an engineer at Uber in 2016 and eventually decided to start a company based on the open source project. He says his idea is to be a neutral, complementary layer between these other data lake products and work with multiple formats, whatever they may be.
“Our thesis is that we live in a multi-engine world where there are loads of engines that are going to evolve and sit on top of the same data. We want to help organizations avoid having to migrate every time there is a new engine,” Chandar told businessroundups.org.
The open source project has gained strength with 2,200 pull requests on GitHub last year and more than 600 engaged users on the GitHub platform, the company said.
A certain percentage of those open source users will eventually want to move to the managed cloud service, and the company is working with paying customers in production today. For now, however, head of product Kyle Weller says the cloud product will remain in preview mode to keep the number of paying customers at a manageable level.
“We are still in a preview mode where we want to slow down the number of people coming in as we build and train our entire global support team and some of these other building blocks and components,” Weller explained.
The new money has allowed the company to double the team, from 15 at the time of last year’s launch announcement to 30 today. The startup has so far focused on hiring tech talent, but Chandar says the emphasis is changing. “We’ve been hiring more on the product and engineering side over the past year, but given the current stage of our business, we’ll be focusing much more on hiring and growing our go-to-market team,” he said.
The $25 million Series A closed in the second half of last year and was co-led by Addition and Greylock, the same firms that co-led the seed round. The new money brings the total amount raised to $33 million.
