Israeli startup Upsolver, which developed a platform for processing Big-Data on data lake projects, announces a $13 million Series A funding round. The investment was led by Vertex Ventures US with the Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), who led the last funding round, and U.S. based Wing VC also participating in the funding. Additionally, private investors like Veritas founder, Jeffery Rothschild and former Informatica Chairman and CEO Sohaib Abbasi also got in on the Series A round.
Hitting goals quicker than before
Many organizations use data lake platforms - all the raw data collected from an organization and stored in one place. Utilizing data lakes allows companies to analyze massive amounts of raw data by separating the database into three parts: storage, processing, and meta-data. On one hand, the separation significantly reduces costs and dependence on one database provider, however this also creates a new time-consuming, costly, and talent thirst engineering complex in managing each part separately.
Co-founder and CEO, Ori Rafael explains to Geektime that “Upsolver counteracts the complexity with a product that doesn’t demand programming, and accelerates the completion of Big-Data projects 10 times faster.” The company’s platform automates recurring tasks by using a SQL-based visual tool that is accessible to every technical user in the organization. All this culminates into a visual platform enabling the processing of massive databanks. “The cost-effective use of cloud storage can be very enticing, however, building analytic apps and machine learning becomes highly complex, leaving only Big-Data engineers capable of pulling it off,” Rafael adds.
Another Israeli startup operating in a similar niche is Varada, which can rapidly and precisely analyze petabytes of data. According to Rafael, the two products are quite different, as Varada’s enables users to retrieve data from the lake, whereas Upsolver’s product enables the processing of raw data and making it available for use. “These are two different parts of the value chain. Varada can read data that we made accessible.”
Upsolver was founded in 2014 by Ori Rafael and Yoni Eini, with the two first meeting as part of their military service in the elite 8200 intelligence unit. The idea for the product came after the pair struggled with a data lake they built for optimization in the marketing sector. The company has raised a total of $17 million since it was founded, and currently splits 20 employees between its Tel Aviv, New York, and California offices. Among the company’s list of customers, we find IronSource and Similar Web.
Based on company reports, its annual revenue has nearly tripled over the last year, especially during the COVID-19 crisis. Contributing to this fact is the company’s partnership with Amazon’s AWS. The Israeli startup’s platform easily connects to AWS Athena and Redshift, which makes data lake construction on AWS super simple.
