Firebolt, a start-up developing a cloud data warehouse for analytics, closed a USD 37 million funding round on December 9, 2020.  The company that redesigned the data warehouse concept to work more efficiently and at a lower cost acquired funding from Zeev Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, TLV Partners, and Angular Ventures. The funds will support the company’s go-to-market efforts as it moves forward in product research and amp; development.

Sisense veterans Eldad Farkash and Saar Bitner as COO and Ariel Yaroshevich as CTO cofounded Firebolt, intending to improve the data’s price-performance ratio warehousing. These three were facing the issue of dealing in terabytes of data, while cloud data warehouse straining to deliver good output to power its analytics and other tools. The only way to mitigate the issue was by piling on more extra cloud capacity, i.e., through a cloud data warehouse.

It is analyzed that the cloud data warehousing market is booming because handling enterprise data is a common problem. With some analysts predicting that with enterprise data growing, cloud analytics is also growing, and it is estimated to be a USD 65 billion market by 2025.

However, for companies planning to get help through cloud data, warehouses can become an extravagant expense. And the cost of storage, software, and staff would reach unimaginable heights. The company’s platform helps to scale up and down computer nodes in a shared-nothing architecture while relying on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The customers of Firebolt can leverage data lakes and S3 while working with data under standard file formats to prepare it for performant querying.

Farkash is a technical expert and said that he decided to build Firebolt to handle the cloud data problem. “The only thing I know how to do is build startups,” he joked.

“Data warehouses are solving yesterday’s problem, which was, ‘How do I migrate to the cloud and deal with scale?’” he said, citing Google’s BigQuery, Amazon’s RedShift, and Snowflake as fitting answers for that issue. “We see Firebolt as the new entrant in that space, with a new take on the design on technology. We change the discussion from one of scale to one of speed and efficiency.”

He felt that the data warehouse had been a big-time problem. The companies managing a heap of data are in continuous search of secure, meaningful, and thoroughly worthwhile solutions. This start-up claims that its performance is up to 182 times faster than any other data warehouses. It is a SQL-based system and works on how to handle data in a lighter way.

Still, Farkash said that Firebolt’s concept was initially a challenging sell even to those engineers who were later hired to build the business. It requires building a completely new cloud data warehouse from scratch to run the platform. Today, five of those exist, and more are in the pipeline to be built depending on the funding.

“Firebolt created a SaaS product that changes the analytics experience over big data sets,” Oren Zeev of Zeev Ventures said in a statement. “The pace of innovation in the big data space has lagged the explosion in data growth rendering most data warehousing solutions too slow, too expensive, or too complex to scale. Firebolt takes cloud data warehousing to the next level by offering the world’s most powerful analytical engine. This means companies can now analyze multi Terabyte / Petabyte data sets easily at significantly lower costs and provide a truly interactive user experience to their employees, customers or anyone who needs to access the data.”