Dremio, founded by MapR alumni Tomer Shiran and Jaques Nadeau, is announcing today that it has raised $135 million in Series D funding. This round follows quickly upon the company’s $70 million Series C round in March 2020. This round brings Dremio’s total funding to just over $260M, and the company says it brings its valuation to $1 billion.
Also read: Startup Dremio emerges from stealth, launches memory-based BI query engine
The Series D round is led by Sapphire Ventures with participation from existing investors Insight Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and Cisco Investments. Dremio says the investment will help it expand its engineering centers of excellence around the globe, grow its customer-facing organization, contribute to open-source initiatives, and invest in education and enablement of data lake practitioners.
Dremio is the key commercial entity behind Apache Arrow, an open source technology that enables an in-memory serialization format for columnar data. Arrow allows software platforms compatible with it to share such data with needing to decode and re-encode it in their own proprietary formats. Arrow has contributors and adopters from a number of players in the analytics and AI arenas. Related projects like Gandiva and Nessie are also driven by Dremio. The company is also helps evangelize Apache Iceberg.
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Dremio uses Arrow and other technologies to accelerate interactive querying against data in data lakes. The company’s eponymous platform initially focused on data virtualization scenarios across numerous data sources, and can still function in that capacity. Its transformed focus on cloud data lakes allows that analytics approach to compete handsomely with the cloud data warehouses of the world. With Snowflake and other data warehouse vendors basking in the limelight lately, Dremio’s new funding gives the data lake side some stardom as well.
