The 10 Hottest Big Data Startups Of 2021
Businesses are looking to next-generation databases, data management tools and big data analytics software to help them leverage huge volumes of data to gain a competitive edge. Here’s a look at 10 hot big data technology startups developing leading-edge technologies that help solution providers and customers meet their big data challenges.
Startups Offer Next-Generation Tools For Big Data Management And Analytics
Businesses and organizations are overwhelmed with big data, struggling to effectively manage data that’s growing in volume, expanding in variety and accelerating in speed—never mind efforts to organize and analyze all that data to gain valuable insight that can lead to competitive advantages.
Here’s a look at 10 big data technology startups with ground-breaking technologies that have caught our attention—so far—in 2021. The list includes companies developing leading-edge products in data operations, data management and automation, data quality, data transformation and integration, big data analytics, and databases and data warehouses.
See the latest entry: The 10 Hottest Big Data Startups of 2022
Airbyte
Top Executive: Michel Tricot, Co-Founder, CEO
Airbyte has developed an open-source data integration/ELT (extract, load and transform) engine that businesses and organizations use to quickly build data pipelines, using both provided and custom connectors, that replicate data between databases, data warehouses and data lakes.
The San Francisco-based company is challenging established data management tech vendors like Informatica and Talend as well as younger ELT vendors including Fivetran and Matillion. Airbyte currently offers a free community edition of its software and is developing commercial cloud and enterprise editions with extended capabilities.
Launched last year, Airbyte in May closed a $26 million Series A funding round led by Benchmark. That came on the heels of a $5.2 million seed round of funding in March.
Bigeye
Top Executive: Kyle Kirwan, Co-Founder, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Delayed, missing, duplicated and damaged data can hinder big data projects and digital transformation initiatives. Bigeye offers a data quality engineering platform that helps data management teams identify and fix data quality problems.
The platform automates data quality management tasks by instrumenting data sets and data pipelines, applying metrics to monitor and measure data quality, detecting data anomalies and alerting data managers when issues occur.
Bigeye, founded in 2019 and based in San Francisco, raised $17 million in Series A funding in April and then another $45 million in Series B funding in September, financial resources the company is using to accelerate its product development and expand its go-to-market efforts.
Cribl
Top Executive: Clint Sharp, Co-Founder, CEO
Cribl’s observability data engineering software, including its flagship LogStream system, is used to build pipelines for routing high volumes of telemetry data, including machine log, instrumentation, application and metric data, between operational, storage, analytical and security systems.
In October Cribl launched LogStream Cloud Enterprise Edition, a cloud service for securely managing globally distributed observability data pipelines. The service makes it possible for businesses and organizations to centrally configure, manage, monitor and orchestrate data observability pipeline infrastructure anywhere in the world, according to the company.
Cribl, founded in 2017 and based in San Francisco, raised $200 million in a Series C round of funding that the company plans to use to expand its go-to-market efforts, including channel initiatives.
Firebolt
Top Executive: Eldad Farkash, Co-Founder, CEO
Firebolt develops a cloud data warehouse with which the startup is boldly competing against such giants as Snowflake and AWS Redshift (while running on AWS, no less). The company touts the speed at scale, ease of use and more affordable operating model of its technology.
Firebolt’s system was designed to decouple storage and compute, which the company says allows for granular elasticity and scalability in a shared-nothing architecture—while relying on S3 shared storage. System performance also gets a boost from the ability to query semi-structured data using standard SQL, without complicated ETL (extract, transform and load) practices, and faster data updates with the Firebolt File Format.
Firebolt, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, was founded in 2019 by Sisense veterans Eldad Farkash and Saar Bitner. The company raised $127 million in Series A financing in June, capital the startup will apply to accelerate product development.
Grafana Labs
Top Executive: Raj Dutt, Co-Founder, CEO
Grafana Labs develops the popular Grafana open-source data visualization and analytics platform for building data dashboards and visualizations for metric, log and trace data generated by IT infrastructure, networks, cybersecurity tools and other systems. The analytics and visualizations are used by IT and AppDev managers to monitor IT system performance and track users and events.
The company also provides commercial enterprise and cloud service editions of Grafana with additional functionality, plug-in software, training, and professional and support services.
In November Grafana Labs struck a strategic partnership with Microsoft to develop a Grafana managed service that runs on the Azure cloud platform. The deal is similar to a partnership the startup has with Amazon Web Services.
Grafana Labs, founded in 2014 and based in New York City, raised $220 million in a Series C round of funding in August that put the startup’s valuation at $3 billion.
Molecula
Top Executive: Higinio Maycotte, CEO
Molecula develops FeatureBase, an enterprise feature store that the company says “simplifies, accelerates and controls” access to big data for real-time analytics and machine learning applications.
In October market researcher Gartner included Molecula in its “Cool Vendor” report on data management companies.
Founded in 2019 and based in Austin, Texas, Molecula raised $17.6 million in Series A financing in January, capital the startup applied to accelerating the launch of Molecula Cloud and to expanding sales and marketing efforts.
Monte Carlo
Top Executive: Barr Moses, Co-Founder, CEO
Monte Carlo’s data observability software is used to monitor data across IT systems, including in databases, data warehouses and data lakes, to gauge and maintain data quality, reliability and lineage—what the company calls “data health.”
The startup’s platform evaluates data according to its freshness and how up to date it is, the volume or completeness of data tables, the data schema or organization of the data, data lineage including sources and usage, and the data’s distribution (whether the data’s values are within an accepted range).
Monte Carlo, founded in 2019 and based in San Francisco, raised $60 million in Series C funding in August, financing the company will use to accelerate product development, fuel its go-to-market efforts and promote the data observability concept.
Speedata
Top Executive: Jonathan Friedmann, Co-Founder, CEO
Speedata develops an Analytics Processing Unit (APU) that the company describes as the first dedicated processor for optimizing and accelerating data center and cloud-based database and data analytics workloads.
With the Speedata APU, currently in the prototype stage, the company is promising a two-fold magnitude or more performance boost over mainstream processors for database and business analytics processes. A single server incorporating the APU will be capable of replacing multiple racks of CPUs, dramatically reducing costs, saving space and reducing energy consumption, the company says.
The Netanya, Israel-based startup exited stealth in September and announced $70 million in venture funding.
Syncari
Top Executive: Nick Bonfiglio, Co-Founder, CEO
Syncari’s no-code data automation platform helps data professionals unify, clean, manage and distribute trusted customer data across an enterprise. The system relies on a range of data synchronization, unification, governance and access capabilities to perform its tasks.
In June the company unveiled the addition of sophisticated workflow capabilities to help sales and marketing teams make more effective use of customer data.
Syncari, based in San Francisco, was founded in June 2019 by former executives from Marketo, Mulesoft and Zendesk. In May the company announced a $17.3 million Series A round of funding.
Yugabyte
Top Executive: Bill Cook, CEO
Yugabyte develops YugabyteDB, a next-generation, distributed relational database designed to handle huge amounts of data spanning multiple geographic regions and availability zones. The database supports global, business-critical applications—such as in cybersecurity and financial services—that require low query latency and extreme resilience against failures.
In September the startup launched Yugabyte Cloud, a fully managed Database as a Service for building cloud-based applications and moving legacy applications to cloud platforms.
Yugabyte’s founders, including President Kannan Muthukkaruppan, CTO Karthik Ranganathan and Software Architect Mikhail Bautin, founded Yugabyte in 2016 after developing business-critical database technology at Oracle and Facebook.
In October Yugabyte raised $188 million in a Series C round of funding that put the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company’s valuation at more than $1.3 billion.