Israeli big data processing start-up Upsolver secures $13 million
Upsolver's software compresses data lakes to analyze large volumes of structured and unstructured statistical in a cost-efficient manner.
By ZACHARY KEYSERPersonal data source code (Illustrative)(photo credit: PIXABAY)
Upsolver, an Israeli big data processing start-up, secured $13 million during its Series A+ funding round, the company announced on Tuesday.The tech start-up intends use the most recent funding towards expanding its North American portfolio, its research and development divisions as well as its multi-cloud capabilities. The company has raised a total of $17 million to date.“Big data engineers are a unicorn hire,” said Upsolver’s CEO and co-founder Ori Rafael. “They should spend their time solving an organization’s hardest data problems instead of performing repetitive tasks like job orchestration, ETLs, and IT management. Upsolver helps automate repetitive tasks with a powerful tool that can be used by existing data practitioners. Our customers see an average of 95% reduction in the data lake management effort.”Upsolver's software compresses data lakes to analyze large volumes of structured and unstructured statistical in a cost-efficient manner - separating storage, compute and metadata values - allowing companies to process, manage and peruse through large data sets in a timely fashion.This separation dramatically reduces both cost and dependency on one database vendor, but it introduces a new engineering complexity — each piece must get configured, optimized, and synchronized with the rest. This time-consuming and cost-prohibitive process could historically only be completed by big data engineers who code and operate open source software like Apache Spark or Hadoop," Upsolver explained in a company statement.The funding round itself was led by Vertex Ventures US, with participation from existing investors Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) and Wing Venture Capital (Wing), marking an increase in demand for Upsolver's services, who tripled its annual revenue accompanying the increase in customer use amid the coronavirus pandemic. Upsolver's customer user base has doubled in the past six months.Coinciding with the investor list, Upsolver intends to add two new people to their board of directors - general partner and co-founder at Vertex Ventures US Sik Rhee, JVP partner Gadi Porat. Founder of Veritas and senior technology executive at Facebook Jeff Rothschild as well as former CEO and chairman of Informatica Sohaib Abbasi became additional investors during this round.“We see Upsolver creating a cloud-native standard for data lake computing,” said Vertex Ventures US' Rhee. “Upsolver succeeded in abstracting away the engineering complexity of data pipeline management so that enterprise customers can quickly solve their modern data challenges in real-time and at any scale, without having to build another silo of expertise within the organization.”Upsolver founders Rafael and Yoni Eini met while working in Israeli intelligence. Rafael headed a data integration platform division while Eini worked as a CTO for a related data science group.The inception of Upsolver accompanied an issue Rafael and Eini encountered while building a data lake intended to optimize advertising campaigns - which the two developed their current software platform around, tailoring it to specific situations in the latter stages of the company. Considering this made the two founders Upsolver's first customers, much of the company's success can be attributed to the affinity the two have towards the designed product and what they know it can accomplish.
“We believe in Upsolver’s unique solution and the company’s ability to be a leader in the emerging data lake market," Porat said. "We anticipate that the vast majority of enterprise data will be stored in data lakes and that Upsolver will be the platform to make this data easily available in real time. Using familiar data interfaces allows organizations to extend the use of data lakes to their existing data management teams.”Upsolver is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) Advanced Technology Partner, therefore organizations can buy and deploy Upsolver's platform directly from the AWS marketplace and use it directly with AWS services such as Athena and Redshift, which run ad hoc queries on Amazon data sets. The company itself has a global team working out of Israel, California and New York - serving big name Israeli companies such as IronSource, Sisense and Similar Web as well as US-based Asurion and Cox Automotive.
