Today, we are excited to announce that Lightspeed is leading a $7M seed round in Ponder, the company behind two popular open-source projects, Modin and Lux.
As both investors and technologists ourselves, we’ve seen first-hand how taking raw data and then loading, cleaning, analyzing, and wrangling it into usable form is often the most painful and time-consuming part of a data scientist’s job. Luckily, the world has pandas, a free Python library that has become a must-use tool for tackling these problems, with an estimated 5–10M users.
Unfortunately, pandas wasn’t designed for large datasets. So when it’s time to scale to gigabytes or even terabytes of data, data scientists are often forced to re-write everything in a big data framework, learning an entirely new language and consequently becoming distributed systems experts in the process. Complexity skyrockets, and this is where many data science teams stumble.
The founders of Ponder (Doris Lee, Devin Petersohn and Professor Aditya Parameswaran) are a brilliant team who all worked together in UC Berkeley’s esteemed RISE Lab and have been researching these problems for years. They created Modin, a dataframe library that wraps pandas and transparently distributes the data and computation with just a one-line code change, with no difference in workflow across local machines or remote clusters. They also noticed that pandas lacks a visual exploration element and created Lux, a library which automates the visualization and data analysis process via intelligent suggestions within the data science notebook interface.
Together, Modin and Lux significantly accelerate data scientist productivity, measured in both machine time and human time. Practitioners agree: these projects have over 2.6M downloads, 10k Github stars and users at companies like Tesla, Intel, Ford and Bristol Myers Squibb. Ponder’s initial focus will be on creating ‘enterprise ready’ pandas, and over time provide a holistic data science experience.
We feel honored to partner with this amazing team.
— Gaurav Gupta and Nnamdi Iregbulem
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