Varada Raises $7.5Million to Break Through Decade Old Limitations of Big Data Infrastructure

Varada Enables Companies to Leverage Untapped Data in Data Lakes, Paving the Way for the Agile Creation of Data Driven Products

Varada, the pioneer of big data inline indexing, announced a $7.5 million seed funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation by StageOne Ventures and F2 Capital. The round was secured in two phases, with $2.5 million of investment initially led by StageOne Ventures and F2 Capital last year and the completion of the round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, including existing investors, to expand business operations and development.

Enterprises are seeing exponential growth in the amount of data generated daily and in the business opportunities that data can enable, however most of the value of data is untapped, due to the heavy investment that is required for data infrastructure, data preparation and simplifying data access.

Additionally, the architecture of most data infrastructures is rooted in outdated hardware where the main storage media is spinning drives, the network bandwidth is limited and the I/O latency is high, creating many limitations that necessitate data preparation.

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With the advent of cloud, data lakes are becoming the primary storage solution for enterprise data, enabling a simple, highly available and low cost ‘source of truth’. Enterprises can store data in a data lake and worry about its uses later. However, using the stored data to build data products is challenging, requiring a constant trade-off between time to market and cost effectiveness.

Varada’s on-demand SQL analytics tier allows data practitioners to define any dataset of interest directly on the data lake, and to analyze it interactively using SQL or BI tools without the need for data preparation or modeling. Varada’s inline indexing technology can provide interactive sub-second analytics across any dimension or schema, directly on petabyte scale data lakes.

“Most of today’s’ big data software has been designed for decade old hardware assumptions,” said Tal Slobodkin, Managing Partner at StageOne Ventures. “Varada is unique in its approach, as it leverages the innovative hardware trends in SSD storage and networking to completely rethink how analytic software architecture should be built.”

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“Varada has compiled a stellar team of data storage experts who can tap into their vast knowledge and experience to alleviate one of the biggest pain points for data practitioners today,” said David Gussarsky, Venture Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “We invested in Varada because we truly believe in the team and think they are creating a new standard for big data infrastructure. We’re excited to help them develop and expand their capabilities.”

“We know firsthand the daily struggle felt by many data practitioners who are continuously having demands placed on them, often resulting in the compromising of the quality of their work,” said Eran Vanounou, CEO of Varada. “I have led large data driven global organizations for the past 15 years. When I met Varada’s founding team and saw their technology, I realized immediately it’s value for enterprises – it solves the pain points that many CTOs and CIOs across the industry are experiencing. I also knew that I wanted to help them bring this technology to market.”

Jonny Saacks, Managing Partner at F2 Capital, added: “We’re always on the lookout for disruption in the deep technology arena, and believe Varada has massive potential to be a real market game-changer.”

Varada was founded by Tal Ben Moshe, Roman Vainbrand and David Krakov, veterans of the Dell EMC XtremIO core team, with the mission to establish a new data infrastructure which gives data practitioners complete control over performance, cost and flexibility.

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