- Streaming SQL database company Materialize announced that it has raised $40 million in funding.
Streaming SQL database company Materialize announced that it has raised $40 million in funding — which will be used to grow its engineering team, prepare the business for growth, and extend product rollout. Bucky Moore of Kleiner Perkins led the $32 million Series B round. And Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated in the B round after Ravi Mhatre led the Series A investment in 2019. The additional investors include executives from Cockroach Labs, Datadog, and Rubrik.
Gartner pointed out that by 2022, most major new business systems will use streaming data to improve decision making whether it is delivering personalized experiences, accurately identifying fraud, building predictive AI, or discovering new business opportunities, the ability to run complex queries on multiple streams of data is critical to making better decisions. And Materialize makes it simple for any business to use streaming data while accelerating time to value.
In an industry where “real-time” has become a vague marketing claim, Materialize provides businesses with millisecond response times, accelerating time-to-value and enabling decision makers to confidently predict results instantaneously. And any developer or analyst who uses Materialize can easily understand streaming data, answer complex questions and build intelligent applications using standard technology.
Materialize is known as the first standard SQL interface for streaming data available to engineers looking to build complex queries and multiway joins without specialized skills or microservices. And unlike other streaming data platforms that claim to be real-time, Materialize computes and incrementally maintains data as it is generated so query results are accessible the moment they are needed. This approach is known for providing businesses with correct answers in milliseconds without interference from late-arriving data.
Launched in 2019 in New York City, the Materialize team includes engineers who were early employees of Cockroach Labs, Datadog, Dropbox, Pure Storage and YouTube. And Frank McSherry, co-founder and chief scientist of Materialize was previously at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley where he co-invented Differential Privacy and led the Naiad project. Timely Dataflow (also created by McSherry) and Differential Dataflow serve as the basis of Materialize. And he has won numerous awards for advanced distributed computing and data privacy.
The company has early customers using its products for real-time data visualization, financial modeling, and to advance various SaaS applications in martech, logistics, and enterprise resource planning.
KEY QUOTES:
“A company’s ability to use real-time data for insights and value will determine which companies lead their respective industries in the years ahead. When the world changes quickly, you need a way to interpret the chaos and make the right decisions quickly. Our mission is to make real-time information simple and accessible so businesses can easily identify what’s important.”
— Arjun Narayan, co-founder and CEO of Materialize
“Every business is going to be a real-time business within the next few years, but current approaches require compromises between cost, speed and skills to get there. The Materialize team has been studying this problem for a decade and has built a unique approach that puts them in a strong position to fulfill the massive potential of streaming data without requiring compromises by engineering teams.”
— Bucky Moore, partner at Kleiner Perkins
