Today we’re excited to announce that Acceldata has closed an $8.5 million Series A financing led by Ken Elefant at Sorenson Ventures with participation by existing investors Lightspeed and Emergent Ventures. The financing and revenue growth validates Acceldata’s mission to build the data observability layer missing in the modern enterprise technology stack, as well as accelerates their go-to-market in the US and other geographies.
On a personal note, I’m excited because working with Rohit, Ashwin, Raghu and Gaurav over the past two years to build Acceldata represents a true example of Lightspeed’s focus on investing early – we led the seed round in October 2018, before there was a finished product or paying customer. We have leveraged Lightspeed’s global presence and franchise strength in enterprise technology.
Our Investment Thesis
With respect to looking at infrastructure software companies, our investment thesis involves the following:
- Backing a world-class technical founding team that has domain expertise (at Hortonworks, Inmobi etc.) and has had run-time together previously. Rohit and Ashwin have each founded a company each in the past.
- Addressing a systematic gap that incumbents can’t address. Existing monitoring players have old architectures. Acceldata’s modern architecture and roadmap provides a 10x price-performance jump against older solutions.
- Targeting a large market. There are multiple billions of $$s of latent demand as more and more enterprises reach critical data volumes and deploy mission critical data workloads every day, while not having all the knowhow and personnel to operate this gigantic spaghetti of systems at high efficiency.
- Getting the timing right by getting to PMF at the point of market inflection. We believe there is a rapidly growing data sprawl as the Internet invades every sector of the economy, every business, every government, every household. Coupled with migration from on-prem to hybrid to multi-cloud architectures, this make now the right time for data observability to grow.
World-class Team
We like to develop long-term relationships with founders who have differentiated insights. Rohit, Ashwin and the team are world-class at the technical level – they were contributors to Apache Ambari & Apache Zeppelin and filed multiple patents in data processing. They are also commercially savvy.
I initially met Rohit Choudhary in 2013 when he was running his first startup, Appsterix, which was acquired by [24]7. Rohit went on to develop expertise in the architecture and operations of complex data systems and frameworks while working at Hortonworks. While there, he led ground-breaking projects to improve the management of hybrid data-lakes and data warehouses through Dataplane. That’s where he witnessed firsthand how customers were struggling to monitor, manage, and fix data systems that were rapidly growing in complexity, size, and importance at a number of enterprises.
Category Creation
We like to invest in companies creating and leading in new categories. Emerging categories ride on new waves of need or disruptive technology. Observability is one such new emerging category. In a world where companies are struggling to transform themselves into modern, data-driven enterprises, there’s an urgent need for new tools that are able to effectively monitor, manage, and fix issues in complex, inter-connected data systems. Big data infrastructure is in the midst of an important evolution. Companies no longer can afford to rely on insufficient tools — such as traditional APMs designed for web applications and microservices — and expect to brute force manage complex data pipelines.
Technical Innovation
Data-driven enterprises now have a better option. Acceldata’s data observability platform helps companies solve complex data challenges to ensure the success of the huge investments being made in large-scale, complex data systems. The platform provides real-time operational insights into enterprise data analytics and AI systems. It synthesizes signals across infrastructure, application, and data layers to provide a comprehensive understanding of individual components, data pipelines, and systems.
Equally exciting is the validation provided by big customers in the US and Asia such as GE and Walmart who have deployed Acceldata at scale.
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Best wishes to Rohit, Ashwin and the Acceldata team in this quest for the holy grail of Observability – we are looking forward to many years of partnership ahead of us!
~ Dev, Hemant and the Lightspeed team
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