Highlights:

  • The product is based on optimizing SQL queries and aims to apply the same method in the future for other consumption-based data products like Databricks.
  • The USD, 8.8 million seed investment was led by Greylock and saw participation from several industry angels.

Snowflake has a revenue model that investors must adore, but big customers are less enthusiastic. That’s because it’s based on a consumption model in which the more you use, the more you pay — and when it comes to data management, that can quickly add up.

Bluesky, a new startup founded by two ex-Google and Uber engineers, devised a way to help reduce those bills, and the company announced a healthy USD 8.8 million seed round.

Bluesky co-founder and CEO Mingsheng Hong, who spent more than eight years at Google, says that the company takes a systematic cost-cutting approach. Hong explained, “First, we observe to get the visibility to understand who has been spending and what the most expensive workloads and queries are.” He made fun of this step by calling it “the walk of shame because, finally, everyone knows how much you’re spending.”

The plan is to eliminate tasks that cost money but don’t add much value.

The second step is to get the most out of the money left by figuring out which tasks cost the most and how to change them to lower the overall cost. He said that most of the time, all they must do to save money is change how they run the query.

“These queries will still run, and they will still get the same result, but we run them faster and cheaper by, for example, avoiding scanning a huge table, when we can generate indices [to get the same result] without having to scan a very large dataset.”

The final step, planned for the future, is to have an optimization engine that does all of this automatically for you. Once customers trust the software to do the job, it will automatically scan the workloads and look for ways to save money without any help from the user.

You might think that such a product would put Snowflake in danger, but Hong says the company is a partner. He added, “Snowflake is bringing us in to help customers to reduce or manage growth, and this way, all three parties are happy. Customers can sign a larger contract with Snowflake, and yet they know they have the assurance that they have the cost guardrails that Bluesky provides.”

He said that the product is based on optimizing SQL queries and aims to apply the same method in the future for other consumption-based data products like Databricks.

Even though the company has only been around for six months, more than 10 customers, including Coinbase, use its product. Hong and his CTO, Zheng Shao, started the company. Shao helped build the open-source project Apache Hive, a SQL query engine built on top of Hadoop. This was one of the first ways to deal with large datasets.

The company currently has 15 employees, and he is trying to build a diverse group immediately. Hong said, “In terms of diversity, we make sure that we have people coming in with different perspectives. They may have a different perspective due to their culture or gender, but first and foremost, it’s not about trying to diversify for the sake of diversity, hitting some metrics. It’s about people coming in with different ideas and perspectives.”

The USD, 8.8 million seed investment, made today was led by Greylock and saw participation from several industry angels.