Upsolver, a no-code start-up that enables analytics on cloud data lakes, announced on March 6, 2021, that it raised USD 25 million in financing led by Scale Venture Partners. The company has also launched a free community edition of its product. They believe that the funds will be used for hiring engineers and scale go-to-market efforts.
According to a survey by Deloitte, most CIOs have said that moving to the cloud is their top IT spending driver in 2020. However, the creation of an analytics-ready cloud data lake is expensive and challenging. Upsolver is software designed to prime data lakes for analytics. The company was founded in 2014 as a platform to offer a visual structured query language (SQL) interface and automation for tuning, data optimization, and orchestration.
“We wanted to store data affordably in the cloud without analytics vendor lock-in,” Ori Rafael, Co-founder of Upsolver, said. “Unfortunately, what used to take three hours using SQL turned into 30 days of hand-coding and complex Spark configuration. We created Upsolver to bridge this gap between raw cloud data and analytics-ready data.”
Its product lets companies perform analytics using a range of query engines and data systems that include PrestoDB, Snowflake, Trino, Athena, Splunk, Synapse Analytics, and Elasticsearch. The aim is to replace all customer’s code-heavy approaches with Upsolver’s computer solution. It keeps a balance of customer’s cloud storage and their preferred tools, apps, and engines.
“Upsolver is a critical component for successfully implementing a cloud data lake for analytics, which is a popular approach due to the affordability that data lakes provide. We complement cloud data warehouses, search engines, and other purpose-built data stores as well,” Ori Rafael said. “Upsolver is often used to output prepared data to those platforms making data available to standalone query engines. Data engineers use Upsolver’s visual user interface to build any data transformations and preparation tasks. This generates SQL that the data engineer can also directly edit to fine-tune the processing.”
The Upsolver will soon have the ability to replace databases with data lakes while keeping them up to date. The platform is now available on Azure and will soon be known as a community edition delivering “free-forever” capabilities for those having less workloads. It provides a proving ground for companies who might feel like working with companies like Upsolver on significant use cases.
“Monolithic analytics platforms are a thing of the past. Today’s organizations require a variety of analytics tools to fully capitalize on their data,” Ariel Tseitlin, Co-founder of Upsolver, said in a press release. “Data lakes originally promised this variety and openness but also required a large, ongoing investment in engineering. Upsolver eliminates this trade-off.”
The significant benefit attached to Upsolver is that it is in touch with two fast-growing markets, data lakes and big data analytics.
