Firebolt Enters Data Warehousing Market With $37M

Israel-based Firebolt launched its data warehousing platform into the market after raising $37 million in a Series A round of funding, as it prepares to take on Google, Amazon and Snowflake in the space.

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Funding for the round came from Zeev Ventures, TLV Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Angular Ventures.

“The need for this is obvious,” said Oren Zeev of Zeev Ventures. “It’s a huge opportunity—just look at the market cap of Snowflake.”

Firebolt’s approach to data warehousing differs from its larger competitors, which typically focus on moving data to the cloud and scaling, said the company’s co-founder and CEO Eldad Farkash. Firebolt’s platform aims to deliver faster analytics from more data with better efficiency and using fewer cloud resources, he said.

The company claims its platform’s analytics performance is up to 182 times faster than other data warehouses.

“I think every company is reliant on larger quantities of data,” Zeev said. “Because of that, they all require great infrastructure. That’s why Firebolt is so compelling.”

Entering a big market

While the global cloud analytics market is expected to grow to $65 billion in the next five years, large players such as Amazon’s Redshift, Google’s BigQuery and Snowflake already exist.

However, Farkash said he sees room for a new player with an offering that is faster, cheaper and more elastic. Founded in 2018, the company is revenue producing and has more than a dozen customers who have helped develop the platform.

The 50-person company will use the new money to grow its sales and marketing as it enters the market, Farkash said. The company currently is focusing on building its infrastructure partnership with AWS, as well as creating downstream partnerships with others in the data ecosystem, he added.

The Snowflake effect

In September, Snowflake’s IPO popped—more than doubling on its first day of trading in the biggest software IPO ever. The data warehousing giant now has a market cap of more than $120 billion.

“I was not surprised it was so big,” said Farkash, adding it just helped validate the importance of data. “I’m happy for the exposure (to the market) it gave.”

Zeev said the data warehousing space did not need Snowflake’s IPO for validation, but the event generated interest in the sector. He added he gets calls from and emails consistently from growth- and late-stage investors wanting to be introduced to Firebolt.

“There’s no question of the interest of investors in the space,” he said.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.