- Autonomous Dataflow Service provider Ascend announced it emerged from stealth and raised $19 million in Series A funding
Ascend — the provider of the world’s first Autonomous Dataflow Service — announced it has emerged from stealth with $19 million in Series A funding to de-risk big data projects and accelerate digital transformations. Accel led the Series A round with participation from Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and 8VC.
Essentially, Ascend operates the only solution with which data engineering teams can quickly build, scale, and operate continuously optimized Apache Spark-based pipelines. And by combining declarative configurations and deep automation, the Ascend Service manages cloud infrastructure, optimizes pipelines, and eliminates maintenance across the entire data lifecycle.
Some of the company’s advisors include Kevin Scott (CTO of Microsoft), Scott McNealy (former Sun Microsystems CEO), Maynard Webb (Board Member at Salesforce and Visa), Deep Nishar (Senior Managing Partner of Softbank Vision Fund), and Luanne Dauber (former CMO at Confluent and VP Marketing at Pure Storage).
“I’ve worked with hundreds of companies over the years and have seen firsthand the challenges encountered with big data and digital transformation,” said Sean Knapp — the founder and CEO of Ascend. “I founded Ascend to fix data pipelines, a critical and ubiquitous component of data architectures that have been neglected until now. By streamlining data pipeline development and automatically optimizing its ongoing performance, we have changed the game for data engineers and the data consumers that depend on them.”
Data pipelines are considered the lifeblood of every big data project and transformation strategy. And building these pipelines is a time-consuming process for data engineers thus requiring fragmented infrastructure and specialized tooling, extensive manual coding, and painful trial and error. And even then, the pipelines become more brittle and prone to failure as data changes, dependencies grow, and the interconnectedness of data movement among systems becomes increasingly complex. So scarce data engineers spend the majority of their time combing through code and logs just to keep everything running rather than building for new business opportunities.
The Ascend Autonomous Dataflow Service eliminates these challenges. And its automation and continuous operation of pipelines radically improves data engineering thus enabling pipeline creation with 85% less code and reducing the time spent from prototype to production by 90%.
“The market is on the cusp of a new wave,” added McNealy. “The winners of the past decade are those who best leveraged data to fuel their business, yet increased competition necessitates they do more, faster, and with greater efficiency. We’ve seen automation transform every industry and this will be no exception. I have worked with dozens of startups, and it’s rare a company possesses both the experience to define the root of a monumental problem and the talent to do something amazing about it. Ascend is such a company, and their innovation will unequivocally usher in a new era of data engineering.”
And data engineers can now build using declarative configurations and compact code while the Ascend Dataflow Control Plane automates the management of cloud infrastructure. And Ascend leverages its powerful Spark engine to handle massive scale while perpetually operating and optimizing users’ pipelines in response to inevitable data changes.
“We immediately recognized how big the market opportunity is for Ascend,” explained Accel partner Steve Loughlin. “Analytics, AI, and automation are some of the biggest trends we see today, and Ascend is the first to apply such advanced technology to the actual development process that fuels the innovations we hear so much about. The impact Ascend has on the speed of innovation is impressive.”
Through its technology, Ascend stands to change the perception of big data and AI-driven initiatives by increasing success rates of such projects across industries. And while organizations worldwide will spend more than $1.8 trillion annually by 2021 on big data and AI-driven digital transformation efforts (source: Wells Fargo Asset Management), many are going to struggle to translate those investments into business success.
The leading causes according to many industry researchers include insufficient resources and expertise to support data initiatives, difficulty accessing siloed data, and an increased urgency for fast analysis and delivery. And the Ascend Autonomous Dataflow Service launches into this landscape for addressing each of those challenges with a compelling new path forward for how businesses unlock value from big data and AI initiatives far faster and more reliably than the status quo.
“I’ve found that a key ingredient for company success is having a strong leadership team with diverse perspectives,” noted Sequoia Capital partner Bill Coughran. “Ascend has achieved that with the extraordinary group of leaders it has in place, and we look forward to what the future holds.”
Ascend’s Autonomous Dataflow Service runs natively in Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and the Google Cloud Platform. And Ascend combines declarative configurations and automation to manage the underlying cloud infrastructure, optimize pipelines, and eliminate maintenance across the entire data lifecycle.
“Data is the most valuable asset for any enterprise, but the path to unlock value and innovate with it is mired in complexity and manual inefficiencies,” commented John Santaferraro — the Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates. “Ascend uses AI-enabled data integration that helps insight-driven organizations build, operate, and automate complex ecosystems of data pipelines. EMA believes that AI-enabled data companies, like Ascend, will rise above their competitors and lead the next wave of digital innovation.”
Before launching Ascend, Knapp was co-founder, CTO, and Chief Product Officer at Ooyala where he played a key role in the company raising $120 million in funding, scaling the company to 500 employees, and driving its $410 million acquisition. And before launching Ooyala, Knapp was the technical lead for Google’s Web Search Frontend team and helped increase Google’s revenues by over $1 billion.
Ascend’s Chief Customer Officer Tom Weeks held similar SVP and GM roles at SAP, ThoughtSpot, and Apigee. And Ascend’s Anupama Kirpekar (SVP of Engineering) and Steven Parkes (Chief Technology Officer) previously held executive positions at HPE, Nimble Storage, NetApp, Twitter, and Square.
