iguazio Raises $33M to Accelerate Digital Transformation

Today we announced a $33M investment from top VCs - Verizon Ventures, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, CME Ventures and Dell Technologies Capital. It’s a major step in our ambitious goal of accelerating digital transformation by enabling modern cloud and analytical services close to the edge.

iguazio simplifies the data stack and enables organizations to automate their operations, improve customer interactions and provide new services to stay competitive in the digital era. Raising financing from a leading service provider, IoT vendor, the financial sector and infrastructure players demonstrates the criticality of this transformation to enterprises. It also validates our vision and execution capabilities.

Our approach is simple: companies want to consume well-engineered services and APIs so that they can focus on their actual business, instead of on the complexity of data pipelines. Public cloud is one option, but it doesn’t fit every need because data has gravity which is best handled with fast and agile services close to the edge.

Yes, you can buy some legacy infrastructure or “converged” offerings disguised as a “private cloud”. Go ahead and try implementing 10-year-old Hadoop and BI technologies which force you to build and integrate the entire stack from fragments of technologies and layers of inefficiency.

Continuous Analytics: Begin with the End in Mind

iguazio’s new funding round follows successful deployments across major financial, ride-sharing, media, cyber security and IoT customers.  Among other initiatives, we plan to utilize the investments to rapidly expand our field and data science teams to help more customers digitally transform faster and with less friction. Working directly with end users, we have been constantly exposed to common practices. We discovered that companies are building analytics playgrounds: they build clusters, collect data in lakes, slice and dice it to extract features and anomalies with scarce data scientists or engineers, sometimes without any clear business goal. They want to gain actionable insights and dynamically adjust features according to changing needs, but without an agile and real-time system, they’ll find that their playground suddenly doesn’t fit.

Furthermore, data can’t be periodically collected using ETLs – it must flow in continuously. Security requirements often halt the entire project and operational requirements such as data backups, upgrading versions of code in production, handling errors or performance tuning are critical. When mishandled, preparing your system for “day 2” operations can delay you by another year.

We suggest a different path: build a continuous application with an agile and cloud-native approach, thinking about production deployment from day one. Stream data from all sources continuously into a real-time unified data platform. Clean, index and tag the data as it flows in so that it can easily be retrieved and secured.

iguazio lets you break your application into elastic and stateless micro-services to run various tasks:

• Front end APIs and dashboards
• Interactive analytics research, feature extraction and machine learning
• Data enrichment and aggregation in real-time
• Predictions or prescribed actions based on real-time data and fresh AI models

Once your data is unified into a secure real-time data platform and all your tools (APIs, custom logic, Spark, Tensor Flow, etc.) are stateless and containerized, deploying new applications, upgrading code, or scaling a service becomes simple. iguazio leverages tools such as Kubernetes and built new real-time serverless technology (will soon be open sourced) to make things even simpler so that our customers can focus on business instead of data.

We’re excited about this round of financing that will help us fulfill our vision with more customers, and take our product capabilities to new extremes. We might be able to help if you are struggling with building modern applications. We’re also actively hiring so apply to join iguazio’s rapidly growing family if you are smart and experienced in cloud and data science.