Upsolver Raises $13M to Fuel Cloud Data Lakes Adoption

Upsolver, a software provider that eliminates the high engineering overhead of operating data lakes, raised $13 million series A financing.

FREMONT, CA: Vertex Ventures is US-led the round with participation from Wing Venture Capital (Wing) and prevalent investor Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP).

The organizations use data lakes to analyze large volumes of structured and unstructured data by breaking the typical database into three pieces: storage, compute, and metadata. This separation drastically reduces both cost and dependency on one database vendor, but it introduces a new engineering complexity each piece has to be configured, optimized, and synchronized with the rest. This time-consuming and cost-prohibitive process could only be completed by prominent data engineers who code and operate open-source software like Apache Spark or Hadoop.

"Big data engineers are a unicorn hire," says Ori Rafael, Upsolvers CEO, and co-founder. "They should spend their time solving an organizations 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 percent reduction in the data lake management effort."
In Sik Rhee, General Partner and co-founder at Vertex Ventures US founded Opsware and made early-stage investments in Cloudera and Couchbase, will join the Upsolvers board of directors. Other investors include Jeff Rothschild -the founder of Veritas and first senior technology executive at Facebook, and Sohaib Abbasi - a former CEO and chairman of Informatica.

We see Upsolver creating a cloud-native standard for data lake computing," says 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 Ori Rafael and Yoni Eini's first encounter was in Israeli intelligence, where Rafael was the head of data integration platforms, and Eini was the CTO of a massive data science group. They came across the idea for Upsolver while on a brawl with a data lake they had built for advertising optimization. Being their users from the beginning has led to the success of their products. In the last six months, Upsolver has doubled its user base.

Upsolvers status as an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) Advanced Technology Partner also fueled its momentum. Through the APN program, the Upsolvers platform gets deployed and bought via the AWS marketplace. The platform natively plugs into services similar to AWS Athena and Redshift, making it easy to set up a data lake on AWS. Upsolver is the only partner that is formally recommended to customers by AWS Athena, as listed on the product page.

Upsolver has raised a total of $17 million , with several teams working across Israel, California, and New York. Its clients include Asurion, Cox Automotive, The Meet Group, IronSource, Sisense, and more. Upsolver will use the raised funds to expand its R&D and Sales teams and enhance its multi-cloud capabilities.