Acceldata is a company that has developed the world’s first enterprise data observability platform to help enterprises build and operate great products. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Acceldata founder and CEO Rohit Choudhary.
Rohit Choudhary’s Background
Choudhary co-founded Acceldata in 2018 to provide an end-to-end data observability solution for organizations to observe and optimize modern data systems while maximizing the return on their data investments. And Choudhary said:
“Before starting the company, I served as director of engineering at Hortonworks, where I led the development of Dataplane Services, Ambari, and Zeppelin, among other products. It was during my time there that I was inspired to start Acceldata after repeatedly witnessing my customers’ multi-million dollar data initiatives fail despite employing the latest data technologies and experienced teams of experts.”
Formation Of Acceldata
How did the idea for Acceldata come together? Choudhary shared:
“The world’s most valuable companies – think Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Nextflix, Google – are data-driven. They know that to succeed with complex data systems, they need to understand what’s happening inside their data pipelines and spend millions of dollars building world-class data management and observability tools. However, the vast majority of enterprises lack the bandwidth and expertise to build in-house data observability systems and instead rely on inadequate commercial and open-source solutions designed for the previous generation web and enterprise applications, resulting in sub-optimal operational capabilities, inconsistencies, and poor return on data investments.”
“While working at data-focused companies like Hortonworks, InMobi, 247.ai, and Zalando, I saw that successful analytics and AI follows deep instrumentation that enables experimentation and measures progress consistently. At Hortonworks, I witnessed hundreds of customers struggling to operate, manage, and deliver business results through their enterprise data systems. That’s where we got the inspiration to start Acceldata and solve the enterprise problem by building the next generation of monitoring tools.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Choudhary reflected:
“One of my favorite memories was acquiring one of our earliest customers. This is a large enterprise that found our product and vision so compelling that we essentially walked out of the meeting with a large order in hand.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Choudhary explained:
“Acceldata’s core product is our data observability solution, which is used to monitor enterprise data pipelines and data infrastructure, investigate any issues, and remediate them quickly to provide better quality and more reliable data to consuming data products. We do this for highly complex data operations that process petabyte scale data on a daily basis, and monitor data-at-rest, data-in-motion, and data-for-consumption at scale. Our product is used by data engineers and data leaders, who primarily use it to understand the health and optimize the cost of their data operations.”
Challenges Faced
Have you faced any specific bottlenecks in your sector of work recently? Choudhary acknowledged:
“As with any growing technology company, hiring the right top-notch talent is one of the most challenging aspects. Fortunately for us, our breadth of product, the emphasis on AI (we recently acquired Bewgle, a cutting-edge AI platform), and marquee customers are drawing talent from some of the top companies in the tech industry.”
Evolution Of Acceldata’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Choudhary noted:
“Since our launch, we have achieved the greatest breadth of features in data observability; we currently address all five aspects of data observability as defined by Gartner. Our product’s scalability now is proven at petabyte scale, supporting some of the largest enterprises in the world. Most recently, we’ve added several AI capabilities to our product to simplify onboarding and user experience.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Choudhary cited:
“Our biggest accomplishment is proving the value of our product through some of the largest and most demanding companies in the world who are successfully retooling their data operations with Acceldata as the centerpiece. Our customer base has continued to expand, and as a result we’ve launched our new Canada office to better service and support the growing demand across several functions of our business. This expansion marks our third location in addition to offices in Campbell, CA and Bengaluru, India.”
Customer Success Stories
Can you share any specific customer success stories? Choudhary highlighted:
“PhonePe, a Walmart subsidiary that provides more than 350 million consumers across India with the ability to send and receive money, leveraged Acceldata’s data observability platform to address scaling and performance issues on open-source Hadoop environments. In less than 24 hours, the PhonePe team implemented Acceldata and gained deep insights into its HBase, Spark, and Kafka environments to uncover and remediate infrastructure issues that were masked by normal seasonal and campaign-based activity.”
“In the first 18 months of using Acceldata, PhonePe scaled infrastructure by 2,000%, growing from 70 to more than 1,500 Hadoop nodes and delivering 99.97% availability across its Hadoop infrastructure. The company also eliminated firefighting and performance issues, freeing up engineers to focus on innovation and reduced data warehouse costs by 65% by eliminating the need for commercial licenses.”
Funding Information
After asking Choudhary about funding information, he revealed:
“Acceldata raised a $60 million Series C funding round in 2023, bringing our total capital raised to over $100 million.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Choudhary affirmed:
“Acceldata is unique in that we are the only product that monitors the entire supply chain of data inside the enterprise, including data sources, data landing zone, data enrichment zone, and data consumption zone, as well as monitoring data, users/usage, costs, and infrastructure. Competing products only monitor data in the consumption zone, where it is 100 to 1000 times more expensive to fix and address any issues.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Choudhary concluded:
“One of our company’s future goals is to complete our vision of using AI for data observability and also using data observability for AI use cases. Our breadth of coverage, ability to observe data at rest, data in motion, and data for consumption, and the capacity to observe data anywhere (in cloud, on-premises, hybrid) uniquely positions us to deliver on this vision.”
