- Big data query acceleration innovator Varada recently announced that it has raised a $12 million Series A round of funding
Big data query acceleration innovator Varada recently announced that it has raised a $12 million Series A round of funding. The round of funding is led by MizMaa Ventures with participation by Gefen Capital. And the round also included participation from existing investors Lightspeed, StageOne Ventures, and F2 Venture Capital.
This round of funding comes as Varada prepares to announce the general availability of its data virtualization platform — which will establish a new standard for accelerating big data workloads while optimizing control over performance and cost.
Data is known as the core of innovation and intellectual property for most organizations, constituting their strongest competitive advantage. And organizations must be able to collect, analyze, and act on their data faster than their competitors while ensuring security and control of their data assets.
And following the cloud revolution, the data space is driven by two emerging technologies: data lake and data virtualization. Companies have been typically storing data from different sources in separate silos — which were disparately optimized for each workload. But the data lake enables organizations to avoid extensive, pre-consumption ETLs (Extract, Transform, Load) and significantly cut down on time-to-market.
Through data virtualization, disparate data sources are unified and data consumers can now query any data from a single end-point. And this eliminates the heavy IT operations burden of configuration, modeling and movement of data. But current data virtualization options are hamstrung by scaling limitations and often require extensive data-ops to meet the predictable and consistent performance data users demand. And this is the problem Varada aims to solve.
As the global big data market is shifting to data lake based solutions, Varada is building a platform to revolutionize data virtualization by offering an agile, “zero data-ops” solution that gives the organization full visibility and control while serving a wider range of workloads including those that are latency-sensitive.
Varada’s patented indexing technology utilizes machine learning to accelerate relevant and high-priority queries automatically without any overhead to query processing or any data maintenance. And Varada’s indexing works transparently for users, and indexes are managed automatically by Varada’s proprietary cost-based optimizer.
Varada can identify which queries to accelerate and the indexes to maintain. These capabilities are enabling data teams to serve a wide range of business requirements with no operational overhead and truly deliver the promise of data virtualization.
KEY QUOTES:
“Varada is solving the biggest headaches of data infrastructure teams while giving business units the tools to quickly and cost effectively turn their priceless data assets into value for customers. I know this problem firsthand, as I was the CTO of LivePerson before joining Varada. When I met the founding team, I was blown away at their vision for how to solve one of the thorniest problems in big data. The platform we’re building enables revolutionary ease-of-use, fast time-to-market and cost control. This round of Series A funding will accelerate the progress of our solution and allow us to quickly scale our plans to deliver the new standard for data virtualization.”
— Eran Vanounou, CEO of Varada
“In a world where every organization wants to be data-driven and data sources are growing exponentially in both volume and complexity, Data Virtualization and Data Lake technologies will be at the core strategy of any organization over the next 5 to 10 years. Varada disrupts this space with its unique and innovative indexing-based technology.”
— Aaron Applbaum, partner at MizMaa
“We have been working with the team for a couple of years and strongly believe that Varada brings a fresh approach to solving big data challenges. Varada’s patented technology allows it to leap-frog the current state of the market, overcoming data control issues and offering far more sophisticated capabilities for prioritizing workloads to balance performance and cost.”
— David Gussarsky, partner at Lightspeed
“Varada truly democratizes access to data and empowers data teams with deep visibility and seamless optimization to deliver the most effective data plan for any business requirement. Varada is making great strides, and we’re excited to participate again in this round.”
— Tal Slobodkin, managing partner at StageOne Ventures
“Following the dev-ops revolution, data-ops is now at the center of attention of data executives. Varada’s zero data-ops approach offers data teams the ability to support any big data use case with very fast time-to-market while keeping tight control.”
— Jonathan Saacks, managing partner at F2
