- Upsolver, a company that develops software that eliminates the high engineering overhead of operating cloud data lakes, announced it has raised $13 million in Series A funding
Upsolver, a company that develops software that eliminates the high engineering overhead of operating cloud data lakes, announced it has raised $13 million in Series A funding. Vertex Ventures US led the funding round with participation from new investor Wing Venture Capital and existing investor Jerusalem Venture Partners. Additional investors include Wing, Jeff Rothschild (founder of Veritas and First Senior Technology Executive at Facebook), and Sohaib Abbasi (former CEO and Chairman of Informatica).
This investment symbolizes the growing need for the company’s cloud-native solutions. And Upsolver has tripled overall company ARR and seen increased demand during the pandemic as it saw low churn and significant expansions among its customers. Enterprises are using cloud data lakes to analyze large volumes of structured and unstructured data by breaking the traditional database into three pieces: storage, compute, and metadata. And this separation reduces both cost and dependency on one database vendor, but it introduces a new engineering complexity — which is that each piece must get configured, optimized, and synchronized with the rest. But this process can be time-consuming and cost-prohibitive and could historically only be completed by big data engineers who code and operate open-source software like Apache Spark or Hadoop.
Vertex Ventures US general partner and co-founder In Sik (Insik) Rhee — which is known for founding Opsware (acquired by HP for $1.6 billion) and made early-stage investments in both Cloudera and Couchbase — will join Upsolver’s board of directors along with JVP partner Gadi Porat.
Upsolver founders Ori Rafael and Yoni Eini gad first met in Israeli intelligence where Rafael was Head of Data Integration Platforms. And Eini was CTO of a large data science group. They had come up with the idea for Upsolver while struggling with a data lake they were building for advertising optimization.
And Upsolver’s status as an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) Advanced Technology Partner also fueled the company’s growth. Through the APN program, Upsolver’s platform gets deployed and bought through the AWS marketplace. Plus the Upsolver platform natively plugs into services like AWS Athena and Redshift, making it easy to set up a data lake on AWS. Upsolver is the only partner formally recommended to customers by AWS Athena as listed on the product page.
Including this round of funding, the company has raised a total of $17 million to date. And the company has a global team working across Israel, New York, and California. Upsolver’s customers include Asurion, Cox Automotive, IronSource, and Sisense. With this round of funding, Upsolver will expand its R&D and Sales teams and enhance its multi-cloud capabilities.
Key Quotes:
“Big data engineers are a unicorn hire. They should spend their time solving an organization’s hardest data problems instead of performing repetitive tasks like job orchestration, ETLs, and IT management. Upsolver helps automate repetitive tasks with a powerful tool that can be used by existing data practitioners. Our customers see an average of 95% reduction in the data lake management effort.”
– Upsolver CEO and co-founder Ori Rafael
“We see Upsolver creating a cloud-native standard for data lake computing. Upsolver succeeded in abstracting away the engineering complexity of data pipeline management so that enterprise customers can quickly solve their modern data challenges in real time and at any scale, without having to build another silo of expertise within the organization.”
– Vertex Ventures US general partner and co-founder In Sik (Insik) Rhee
