- Presto-based analytics company Ahana announced it raised $2.25 million in a round of funding led by GV
Presto-based analytics company Ahana announced it raised $2.25 million in a round of funding led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) along with participation from Leslie Ventures and other angel investors. Plus Ahana has joined the Linux Foundation’s Presto Foundation.
With this round of funding, Ahana will be expanding its technical team and delivering Presto-based analytics products.
Founded by Steven Mih (formerly Couchbase, Aviatrix, Alluxio) and Dipti Borkar (formerly IBM, Couchbase, Alluxio), Ahana combines decades of cloud, open-source, database, and distributed systems experience to become the only commercial company focused on PrestoDB. And the project is hosted by the Linux Foundation’s Presto Foundation. Presto has become one of the fastest-growing open-source projects in the data analytics space since Facebook open-sourced the technology in 2013.
Last year, Facebook donated the Presto project to the Linux Foundation to create the Presto Foundation along with founding members Uber, Twitter, and Alibaba. And Ahana has joined the Linux Foundation’s Presto Foundation as a premier member.
Ahana is planning to improve ease of use, documentation, and foster growth of the community users of the PrestoDB GitHub repository. And PrestoDB is the most popular Presto project based on GitHub stars as compared to forks of the project like PrestoSQL.
The data-driven technologies of today like Presto enable faster insights into data. Presto is a widely adopted federated SQL engine for data platform teams to perform ad-hoc querying of data. And as the Presto market continues to grow, Ahana’s mission is to simplify ad-hoc analytics.
Key Quotes:
“Federated query engines simplify and unify data analytics on data anywhere. But of all the engines, Presto is the fastest for ad-hoc querying of data in-place and is highly extensible with its pluggable API. With data spread across many sources and in different formats, as well as the proliferation of a disaggregated compute and storage stack, the sacred data warehouse star schema is no longer in one place. Thus, a federated query engine will become the foundation of architecture to meet the needs of modern data teams.”
– Dipti Borkar, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Ahana
“The data analytics market is evolving, as enterprises look for new opportunities to manage analytical data cost-effectively and at scale. There is a pronounced movement away from expensive, highly-structured data warehouses to ‘data lakes’ of raw data. We see an opportunity in companies who power simple and efficient analysis of this type of raw data and are drawn to Ahana’s vision that leverages the rapidly-growing Presto open source project.”
– Dave Munichiello, General Partner at GV
“As two of our earliest members, Steven and Dipti have been strong supporters of the Presto Foundation since its launch in September 2019. It is our honor to welcome their new company, Ahana, to the Presto Foundation. We look forward to working together to advance our shared mission of building a collaborative, neutrally governed and open community to foster the growth of the PrestoDB ecosystem for users worldwide.”
– Brian Hsieh, Head of Uber Open Source and Chairperson at the Presto Foundation Governing Board
“At Facebook, we believe open source accelerates the pace of innovation. By sharing our code, our stack, our designs, we’re hoping to provide the foundation for companies and individuals alike to scale and build great products. On the Facebook open-source team, we sometimes spin-out projects to the community so that they can grow under a neutral governance structure, with Presto being the latest example of this. We’re thrilled to see that Ahana and other companies have the opportunity to use PrestoDB to build great products and businesses.”
– Amit Chopra, Facebook’s representative on the Presto Foundation Board.
“The Linux Foundation is dedicated to building sustainable, governed, open-source ecosystems to greatly benefit users globally, like what we have achieved with CNCF and the Kubernetes project. Presto Foundation was created to accelerate and foster the adoption of Presto, the original project donated by Facebook. We are excited to welcome Ahana to the Presto Foundation. As the first and only company focused on supporting Presto of the Presto Foundation, we look forward to their continued contributions in building a thriving Presto community.”
– Chris Aniszczyk, Vice President of Developer Relations, The Linux Foundation
“There is no doubt that the future of analytics is pre-ordained by the petabyte-scale data companies like Facebook, Uber, and Twitter, who all run large clusters of PrestoDB. As the first PrestoDB company focused on simplifying ad-hoc analytics, Ahana is poised to corner this new gigantic market.”
– Mark Leslie, Managing Director of Leslie Ventures, and Ahana Advisor
“PrestoDB is exploding in popularity with users around the world. That, combined with Ahana’s vision of simplifying the ad-hoc analytics journey for users, is extremely promising. I look forward to working closely with the co-founders Steven Mih and Dipti Borkar as they rejoin the Presto Foundation and community. While various forks of the original PrestoDB project exist, only PrestoDB has true governance, transparency and vendor neutrality authenticated by the Presto Foundation, under the Linux Foundation.”
– Bob Wiederhold, former Couchbase CEO and Ahana Advisor
