Cloud-native data streaming infrastructure company WarpStream Labs announced it raised $20 million in funding led by Greylock and Amplify Partners. The angel investors who joined the round include Ben Sigelman (Lightstep CEO), Spencer Kimball (CockroachDB CEO), and Barry McCardel (Hex Technologies CEO). WarpStream will use the funding to hire more talent, scale up its market team, and invest in product lines.
Organizations have been looking for ways to utilize real-time data capabilities to gain a competitive advantage. However, most data streaming stacks were built on Apache Kafka, which was built in 2011 for static data centers. This makes the technology expensive and challenging to operate within modern clouds.
While at DataDog, WarpStream founders Richie and Ryan built Husky, a columnar database for observability data that runs directly on top of object storage. Husky replaced existing systems built for traditional data centers with a modern cloud-native architecture that dramatically reduced costs and operational burden.
WarpStream offers a drop-in replacement for Apache Kafka that runs directly on top of object storage without local disks. Its primary offering is to separate compute from storage, like a modern data lake, by using object storage such as AWS S3 as the primary and only storage.
Writing/reading directly from object storage enables WarpStream to eliminate inter-zone networking costs, which often represent over 80% of the total cost of ownership of running a large-scale Kafka workload.
Plus, WarpStream’s compute layer is entirely stateless. This enables instant and unlimited scalability while eliminating almost all of the operational burden associated with Apache Kafka.
The company’s Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) deployment option is now generally available. BYOC offers the benefits of a fully managed SaaS directly into a customer’s cloud account, while reducing costs by 5 to 10 times compared to self hosting Apache Kafka.
BYOC merges compute and storage resources within the customer’s environment with a control plane and metadata service hosted/managed by WarpStream Labs. The data never leaves the customer’s environment, and customers keep operational control of the platform.
KEY QUOTES:
“With Husky, we set out to solve Datadog’s storage problem by making it cost-effective and easy to operate. But we realized that Husky only addressed part of the problem – all the data still had to flow through Apache Kafka. If we could separate compute and storage to reduce costs and operational burden at the database layer, there was no reason we couldn’t do the same at the streaming layer.”
- Richard Artoul, CEO and Co-Founder of WarpStream Labs
“We left Datadog to build a data streaming system that is actually cloud native and cost-effective. With WarpStream, we’ve already made Kafka 10x cheaper and easier to use, and we’re just getting started.”
- Ryan Worl, CTO and Co-Founder of WarpStream Labs
“WarpStream will not only reduce costs and increase reliability of existing Kafka users but will expand the use of streaming data by making it easy and affordable for developers to leverage the power of Kafka with a simple and accessible cloud native solution.”
- Jerry Chen, partner at Greylock and WarpStream Board Director
