Streamkap, a real-time data streaming provider, announced it raised $3.3 million in seed and pre-seed funding for its low-cost and low-maintenance streaming ETL platform. The investors include InReach Ventures, TEN13, Haatch, and Begin Capital. The company has also attracted angel investors with positions at companies like Datadog, Anthropic, and ClickHouse.
Founded in June 2022 by Paul Dudley and Ricky Thomas, Streamkap aims to make real-time data easy, accessible, and low-cost for businesses. Built on Apache Kafka and Flink, its streaming solution offers a simple and affordable setup for companies that need to get their data from A to B faster.
Since launching in 2022, Streamkap has seen significant traction. The company will use the new funding to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams. On the product side, Streamkap is investing in new capabilities for stream processing to enable transformations that further reduce latency.
Dudley and Thomas first crossed paths at Avora, a London-based business intelligence software company founded by Thomas, who has over 25 years of experience in data. Before Avora, Thomas had already established a track record of successful entrepreneurship. In his career, he has launched and sold a pet medication e-commerce business and created one of the first online dating sites in the UK.
Dudley brings experience scaling SaaS and analytics businesses from zero to over $100 million in revenue. His background includes positions at enterprise data analytics companies, including BrightEdge and Netbase. Dudley’s academic degree in physics has also provided him with a strong technical foundation.
Then, Dudley and Thomas noticed companies’ growing pains with batch data processing. They observed that while more companies were adopting streaming data, they often struggled to build the necessary infrastructure.
After Avora, they started Gravity Data, a batch ETL provider that was subsequently acquired. This experience further solidified their view that businesses needed a different solution to move their data faster.
Real-time data powers the experiences consumers have come to expect and demand. When you order a ride or food delivery, you can see the driver’s real-time location on your phone. It wouldn’t be helpful to get an update on your food order an hour after it was supposed to arrive. E-commerce brands also leverage real-time data to personalize the shopping experience, moving beyond traditional batch processing, often resulting in stale product suggestions.
For example, Streamkap is working with discount designer goods e-commerce website BrandAlley to power real-time personalization, similar to the real-time personalization that powers TikTok’s “For You” page.
Streamkap enables faster data for data teams without requiring a complete overhaul of their data infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of batch processing or higher-maintenance streaming solutions. And these factors were essential to why customers like SpotOn, which provides point-of-sale solutions for restaurants and retail businesses, chose to partner with Streamkap.
KEY QUOTES:
“Today, consumers increasingly expect and demand real-time experiences, and businesses need faster data to power these experiences and make critical decisions. We’re making real-time data easy by helping companies get low-latency data into modern data platforms — including Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks — with simple to deploy and use cloud offerings.”
- Paul Dudley
“We’ve seen tremendous demand from companies wanting to make their data real-time, whether they’re looking to speed up their existing data stack with Snowflake or other real-time technologies. This funding will allow us to accelerate our product roadmap and bring real-time data to even more businesses.”
“Having spent years building ETL tools, we believed there had to be a better way. We saw companies trying to speed up batch processing but felt this approach was doomed to fail. Instead, we envisioned a tool that could provide the benefits of streaming data — allowing companies to move data faster with their existing infrastructure — with a similar yet improved user experience to batch processing.”
- Ricky Thomas
“With Streamkap providing real-time data feeds to our personalisation partner Superlinked, we’ve been able to provide real-time recommendations to the second from the moment a new product arrives. This has led to a massive increase in conversion rate and sales growth at all touchpoints where this has been deployed.”
- A spokesperson from BrandAlley
“We already had an existing pipeline that was synchronizing the data from the production database to Snowflake, but a delay in reporting could be significant, especially at peak traffic times for our customers. The second challenge was the cost of maintenance and infrastructure. These were the two main drivers of why we were looking for a different solution.”
“Streamkap was 4x faster and had 3x lower total cost of ownership than our previous solution.”
- Marcin Migda, Data Engineer at SpotOn
“Streamkap is positioned at the intersection of major trends in data—the shift to real-time and the rise of the modern data stack. The team’s deep expertise in data infrastructure and track record scaling data businesses make them well-equipped to become a key player in this space.”
- Roberto Bonanzinga Partner at InReach Ventures
