Rivery is a company that simplifies data integration for businesses of any size to build strong, secure, and unified data infrastructures, bringing together over 200 fully managed data services into a single platform. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Rivery’s Head Of Product Marketing Ariel Pohoryles to learn more about the company.
Ariel Pohoryles’ Background
What is Ariel Pohoryles’ background? Pohoryles said:
“I started as a ‘data engineer’ in a large enterprise before that title existed. From that in-house data team, I moved to a product company focused on data visualization and helping customers create analytics out of integrated data. I then moved on to run the Toronto office of a global data consultancy where we helped customers acquire new data platforms, build their data stacks, and create the end-to-end data flows and visualization that follow it. With Rivery, I have turned my focus back to product because that’s where innovation at scale happens.”
Formation Of Rivery
How did the idea for the company come together? Pohoryles shared:
“Rivery was initially a product we sold as part of the data consultancy that the founders established. We were servicing marketing teams, technology companies, and startups dealing with large volumes of data and very similar sets of data sources. With each new customer and project, we faced the same challenge of ingesting extensive amounts of ad data from Facebook, Google, and innumerable other sources. In consulting, when you tackle a similar challenge repeatedly, you try to build on the IP you’ve created to continuously accelerate your process. Rivery was the solution we iterated upon and once it was ready to be productized, we spun it off to become a separate entity.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Pohoryles explained:
“At its core, Rivery is a complete SaaS platform that enables organizations to build end-to-end ELT pipelines with fewer resources at scale and speed. With no-code and custom-code solutions, it empowers customers to ingest data from almost every data source into their data lakes, data warehouses, and lakehouses, transform it, and then also send it back out to operational applications using reverse ETL.”
“The main function starts with ingesting data by connecting to sources like Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, and others popular databases and external applications, as well as niche offerings that require integration via REST API. Customers can connect within a few clicks and then configure a pipeline to bring data consistently from their sources into their data lake or data warehouse, whether it’s Snowflake, Databricks, or an S3 or Azure blob bucket in the respective cloud.”
“From there, Rivery helps customers transform their data. The platform orchestrates SQL statements or Python scripts to help customers model their data, and prepare it for analytics or other workloads.”
“Finally, Rivery can also push all that data back into operational systems. For example, customers can arm their sales teams by combining data about how prospects use their product and then pushing that data into Salesforce to better prioritize sales opportunities.”
“In addition to a simple user interface, Rivery offers predefined templates, called Starter Kits, to help customers accelerate the process from end-to-end with a few clicks.”
Evolution Of Rivery’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Pohoryles noted:
“Since launching, Rivery’s list of out of the box connectors and library of integrations have expanded consistently. We’ve also added the ability to go further, with reverse ETL workflows and transformation abilities like Python and SQL. Once we added transformation and orchestration on top of ingestion, we were then able to build Starter Kits and develop a marketplace of templates.”
“Most recently, our biggest focus has been leveraging generative AI to help data engineers speed up the development processes. Not only do we leverage generative AI to help build new integrations, but enable GenAI-based applications to work faster and more effectively.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Pohoryles about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“Our customer WalkMe, which provides users with step-by-step guidance to complete online tasks, was recently acquired by SAP for about $1.5 billion. When it started on Rivery, it was a small company with around 200 employees and no data platform. WalkMe relied on internal analytics performed in separate systems, but as it moved into the growth stage, the company needed a simple, efficient way to put all its data tools and reporting systems under one virtual roof. Rivery’s out-of-the-box integrations gave WalkMe immediate access to all their existing data sources and many more, including Google Ads, Bing Ads, Jira, NetSuite, and many more so they could fully analyze those data sources and even build operational applications using analytical data.”
Funding
When asking Pohoryles about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
“We’ve raised $50 million in total. With the end of the zero-interest era, the market changed, but we still see strong demand for data integration. With Generative AI making data even more important, we expect to continue our growth trajectory as we move into our next stage.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Pohoryles affirmed:
“The data integration market, as a whole, is evolving away from the ETL-based legacy vendors that were used on-premises to SaaS tools, giving customers more speed and scale. Most of the other SaaS players, however, have only focused on one piece of the data pipeline. You’ll see vendors offering data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, or Reverse ETL processes, but you don’t see many vendors consolidating them all onto a single, SaaS-based modern platform that performs data management in ELT mode.”
“This is the starting point of our differentiation. As a complete platform, Rivery helps organizations minimize the number of tools they need to learn and implement, minimize the gap between those tools, and simplify troubleshooting by making it easier to recognize and understand problems that arise. The platform’s completeness also empowered us to build Starter Kits – our pre-packaged solution templates that allow users to accelerate their development.”
“Another key differentiator is the granularity of the options Rivery offers our customers. For the sake of simplicity, many vendors strip capabilities away from users. Rivery offers that same ease of use, as well as the option to go into advanced configurations. With low code customization, customers can control their pipeline as they would if they had their own engineers working on it, yet do so on a platform that does all the work for them.”
“Finally, we have a heavy focus on security. We enable customers to keep their data flowing securely through their own cloud bucket instead of Rivery’s environment, unlike other vendors that would retain a copy of the data on their end.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Pohoryles concluded:
“Right now, we’re focused on leveraging generative AI to accelerate both the platform’s development and our customers’ development with Rivery. In other software markets, we typically develop features and then move on to the next feature. In the data integration space, however, the integrations are live. The platform connects two separate pieces of software that are outside of our control. Every time the source or target destination changes, Rivery must change the way things work on the platform to make sure this integration keeps on working smoothly. To make sure our platform remains reliable, development and maintenance cycles are always taking place. Now, we are looking into how generative AI can further accelerate this process and open that same technology for our customers’ use as well.”
