A year after emerging from stealth mode, Firebolt, the cloud data warehouse for builders of next-gen analytics experiences, announced a $100 million Series C funding round, reaching a $1.4 billion valuation. This latest round of funding brings its total investment to $269 million. The new funding will enable Firebolt to capitalize on the exploding demand from tech companies to build analytics-enabled products. Funding will primarily be used to further expand its product and engineering teams.
The need for a data warehousing solution that efficiently manages large volumes of data has become a top priority for software and data engineers, and Firebolt says it is tackling the biggest challenges in this demanding space by developing a cloud data warehouse that delivers sub-second analytic experiences at scale.
According to Firebolt, key benefits of its approach for companies with growing data needs include enabling developers to build and tune data warehouse applications which consistently present order of magnitude gains over existing setups, while requiring less computing power; the flexibility for users to pair any workload with the best fitting compute resources without having to deal with challenges around storage and cluster management; and technology that is tailored to the needs of data application builders, giving them an extensive set of tools to create rich and performant solutions while using the power of SQL.
Firebolt said it selected Alkeon Capital to lead the round due to its experience in the data space and track record in partnering with hyper growth companies. Other participants in the round included Sozo Ventures, Glynn Capital, and existing investors Zeev Ventures, Angular Ventures, Dawn Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, K5 Global, and TLV Partners.
With this new funding round, Firebolt is also announcing the hiring of its CTO, Mosha Pasumansky and the opening of its Sealttle office. Pasumansky was previously a principal engineer on Google’s BigQuery team.
With an employee workforce mostly composed of engineers, the Firebolt team has almost doubled in the past 6 months to 200 team members in 25 countries.
“Data is at the core of every app today,” said Firebolt co-founder and CEO Eldad Farkash. “This means that software engineers need to increasingly become experts in data. We see the role of the data warehouse as the foundation on top of which companies build a multitude of analytic experiences. Our purpose is to push the boundaries of what can be done with analytics and allow companies to leverage data into previously unreachable territories.”
Citing research forecasts that the global cloud analytics market is expected to grow to $65 billion by 2025, with increasing demand driven by digital transformation, Firebolt also noted that current cloud data warehouse deployments continue to struggle with performance and high costs when it comes to analytics at scale, limiting their ability to address the needs of modern data applications.
"We are extremely excited to partner with the world class team at Firebolt to further support their incredible growth,” said Abhi Arun, managing partner at Alkeon Capital. “We’re seeing a shift in the market where every modern app today requires a performant and scalable data infrastructure, and we believe that Firebolt is perfectly positioned to lead this segment of the market and become the cloud data warehouse of choice for modern data engineering and dev teams building interactive analytics experiences at scale.”
For more information, go to www.firebolt.io.