Tabular – the provider of the only independent data platform based on Apache Iceberg- recently announced it has closed a $26M funding round, bringing the total investment in the company to $37 million. This funding round was led by Altimeter Capital, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, who led the previous funding round, and Zetta Venture Partners.
The funding will expand Tabular’s served market beyond AWS to Google Cloud, Azure, and MinIO object storage for on-premises and hybrid cloud deployment. And in that vein, the company also announced a preview of Tabular on the Google Cloud Platform. Tabular customers will be able to add managed Iceberg to their Google stack, with support for Google Cloud Storage and Google BigQuery.
Plus, Tabular also previewed support for the popular Amazon Athena serverless query engine – used by thousands of companies. Tabular already supports Amazon EMR, Snowflake, and Starburst compute engines. Since launching in March 2023, Tabular’s SaaS offering has grown to well over a thousand subscriptions. The signed commercial customers include a leading real-estate marketplace and one of the world’s largest gaming studios.
Apache Iceberg (built by Tabular co-founders Ryan Blue and Dan Weeks while at Netflix) is an open-source table format that provides complete database functionality on top of a cloud object store. And Iceberg has broad support from leading vendors, including AWS, Confluent, Cloudera, Databricks, Google, IBM, and Snowflake.
In 2021, Blue, Weeks, and Netflix colleague Jason Reid launched Tabular to split the database in two, creating a separate, open standard storage layer that could attach to any compute engine. And this approach frees customers from having their data held hostage while maintaining high performance and ease of use.
Tabular is the only independent Iceberg vendor in the market. And it does not offer its own compute layer, enabling customers to mix-and-match query engines to meet their needs. The key attributes of the Tabular service include:
— Compute-neutrality – query from multiple compute engines or frameworks
— Data-layer security – centralized RBAC enforced at the database, table, or column level
— Integrated ingestion – near-real-time loading of files, database events (CDC), and stream sources
— Automated performance – continually optimizes storage to greatly speed queries and reduce costs
— SaaS simplicity – deploys in minutes and auto-scales
KEY QUOTES:
“The near-universal adoption of Apache Iceberg by top-tier cloud data platforms is a testament to the need for a common table format that allows zero-copy use of data across myriad compute engines. With Iceberg, businesses gain the freedom to query data however they like, and to secure their data through a single set of access controls.”
— Ryan Blue
“The cloud ecosystem has begun to consolidate around a small constellation of full-stack vendors, creating a real risk of rent-seeking behavior that can negatively impact customers and stifle innovation. Independent and open platforms such as Tabular offer a path to healthy competition and flexibility for enterprises.”
— Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz
“Tabular’s independent approach has touched a nerve. Despite their short time in-market they have landed well-known companies at platform scope and scale. In essence they’ve built a ‘headless data warehouse,’ which is a game-changer for the industry.”
— Jamin Ball, partner at Altimeter Capital
