Unravel Data, a data operations platform company that provides full-stack visibility and AI-powered recommendations to drive more reliable performance in modern data applications founded by Shivnath Babu (CTO) and Kunal Agarwal (CEO), announced recently that it raised $35 million in an oversubscribed Series C funding round.
“Every business is becoming a data business, and companies are relying on their data applications such as machine learning, IoT, and customer analytics, for better business outcomes using technologies such as Spark, Kafka, and NoSQL,” said Agarwal in a statement. “We are making sure that these technologies are easy to operate and are high performing so that businesses can depend on them. We partner with our customers through their data journey and help them successfully run data apps on various systems whether on-premises or in the cloud.”
Point72 Ventures — a venture firm launched by renowned hedge fund investor Steve Cohen — led this round of funding. Harmony Partners and existing investors Menlo Ventures, GGV Capital, and M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures) also participated in this round.
“At first glance, application performance management (APM) may seem like a problem that has been addressed by the APM and log management vendors such as AppDynamics, New Relic, Splunk, and DataDog. The reality is that these solutions were not initially built for modern data systems. By being natively built with modern IT in mind, Unravel can cost-effectively deliver the data application awareness and AI-powered recommendations, resolutions, and answers that organizations demand,” added Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst Michael Leone. “Additionally, as workloads migrate to cloud platforms, the complexity of multiple systems, locality of services and technologies, different operating and pricing models, and constantly changing dependencies throughout the data pipeline add higher levels of risk to migrations, performance optimization challenges, and cost concerns.”
Over the past year, Unravel Data achieved several milestones including Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) growth of 500% along with cloud services product and partner momentum.
For example, Unravel introduced support for Microsoft Azure services and it uses operational data from Azure HDInsight, Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, Hive, and HBase to automatically troubleshoot on-going issues that reduce confidence and performance on customers’ clusters.
“As enterprises of every size choose the Azure Cloud platform to build and deliver their modern data applications, Unravel has proven an important tool to help operationalize this data and drive tangible value to the business,” explained M12 Ventures partner Rashmi Gopinath. “Azure and Unravel have worked closely on product development and go-to market execution and are well positioned to meet this market demand.”
Unravel Data also introduced its platform across the Amazon ecosystem and supports Amazon through AWS, Amazon EMR, Cloudera EDH for AWS, Hortonworks Data Cloud on AWS, and MapR CDP on AWS — which provides critical operational intelligence. And Unravel is an AWS Advanced Partner and is available in the AWS marketplace.
“Most industry-leading companies are now software businesses, and a majority of those businesses are running on top of mission-critical big data applications,” noted David Dubick — Partner at Point72 Ventures. “These big data tailwinds have created a demand for tools to monitor, optimize and secure these systems, and Unravel is uniquely positioned to address this need in the marketplace.”
In terms of industry accolades, Gartner named Unravel Data on its list of “Cool Vendors” for 2018 in Performance Analysis and Analytics and Containers. And CRN awarded Unravel as a ‘Top 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Company.’ Plus Unravel made CNBC’s Upstart 100 list.
“CIOs in our network told us story after story of traditional application monitoring tools failing in a big data context because those tools were designed for the world of the past. And we didn’t just hear this problem from third parties, we were seeing it at Point72 as well,” said Matthew Granade, Chief Market Intelligence Officer at Point72 and Managing Partner of Point72 Ventures. “This new architecture requires a different product, one built from the ground up to focus on the unique challenges posed by big data applications. Unravel is poised to capture this emerging big-data APM market.”
Unravel essentially simplifies the way businesses understand and optimize the performance of their modern data applications. And it also helps with the complex pipelines that power those applications.
“There’s a tremendous need to enable organizations to maximize the value of their data infrastructure investments,” Harmony Partners founder and managing partner Mark Lotke commented. “Unravel fills that gap perfectly as the only company that is truly using machine learning and an AI-driven platform to optimize and operationalize data-driven applications and the data systems they depend on at scale. The Unravel team demonstrated incredible growth in 2018 and is poised for an even bigger year in 2019 as demand for data operations solutions accelerates.”
Plus Unravel provides a unified view across the entire stack. The Unravel data operations platform leverages AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics for offering actionable recommendations and automation for tuning, troubleshooting, and improving performance.
“It’s clear that enterprises continue to struggle with dealing with the enormous amount of data that fuels their businesses. Legacy approaches have failed and they need to modernize their systems or risk being made irrelevant. Unravel is leading the pack in providing technology innovations that provide this competitive edge and fuel the next generation of cloud and hybrid cloud data services,” Menlo Ventures managing director Venky Ganesan pointed out.
Unravel’s solutions support modern big data leaders by operationalizing how data is done. This list includes Kaiser Permanente, Adobe, Deutsche Bank, Wayfair, and Neustar.
“Since we led the company’s B round, we have been blown away by the market momentum that Unravel has achieved in a short space of time. There is clearly an unmet need in large enterprises for solving the complexity and operational challenges they face as they transition to being data driven and cloud first,” GGV managing partner Glenn Solomon acknowledged. “Current approaches are failing these data ops teams and Unravel has come to market with technology innovation and go-to-market execution that is solving real world problems, today.”
