Israeli Startup Upsolver Raises $13M, Backed By Vertex Ventures US, JVP

By NoCamels Team June 30, 2020 2 minutes

Ori Rafael, CEO and co-founder of Upsolver. Courtesy.

Israeli data processing startup Upsolver has raised $13 million in a Series A financing round, the company announced on Tuesday. Vertex Ventures US led the round with participation from Israel’s Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), an existing investor, and California’s Wing Venture Capital (Wing.)

Founded in 2014, Upsolver manages, integrates, and structures streaming data for analysis. Upsolver founders Ori Rafael and Yoni Eini came up with the idea for Upsolver while struggling with a data lake they built for advertising optimization. In the past six months, Upsolver says it has doubled its user base and tripled its annual revenue rate over the past year.

The company has raised $17 million to date. Existing investors include Adler Chomski, Level VC, Taya Ventures and Kobe Marenko, founder and CEO of Arbe Robotics.

Upsolver said it will use the funds to accelerate its expansion in North America, expand its R&D and customer service teams, and enhance its multi-cloud capabilities.

Upsolver’s platform can be deployed and bought through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplace, and natively plugged into services like AWS Athena and Redshift, making it easy to set up a data lake on AWS. Upsolver is the only partner formally recommended to customers by AWS Athena.

Upsolver’s status as an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) Advanced Technology Partner has fueled its momentum, the company said.

The company has a global team in Israel, California, and New York and its customers include Israeli companies such as IronSource, Sisense and Similar Web, plus US-based companies Asurion, and Cox Automotive among others.

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Organizations use data lakes to analyze large volumes of structured and unstructured data by breaking the traditional database into three pieces: storage, compute, and metadata. This separation reduces both cost and dependency on one database vendor, but it introduces a new engineering complexity — each piece must get configured, optimized, and synchronized with the rest. In the past, this time-consuming and cost-prohibitive process could only be completed by big data engineers who code and operate open source software like Apache Spark or Hadoop.

“Big data engineers are a unicorn hire,” said Ori Rafael, Upsolver’s CEO and co-founder. “They should spend their time solving an organization’s hardest data problems instead of performing repetitive tasks like job orchestration, ETLs, and IT management. Upsolver helps automate repetitive tasks with a powerful tool that can be used by existing data practitioners. Our customers see an average of 95 percent reduction in the data lake management effort.”

In Sik Rhee, general partner and co-founder at Vertex Ventures US, who founded Opsware (acquired by HP for $1.6 billion) and made early-stage investments in both Cloudera and Couchbase, will join Upsolver’s board of directors.

“We see Upsolver creating a cloud-native standard for data lake computing,” said Rhee. “Upsolver succeeded in abstracting away the engineering complexity of data pipeline management so that enterprise customers can quickly solve their modern data challenges in real-time and at any scale, without having to build another silo of expertise within the organization.”

Gadi Porat, partner at Jerusalem Venture Partners will join Upsolver’s board of directors.

“We believe in Upsolver’s unique solution and the company’s ability to be a leader in the emerging data lake market. We anticipate that the vast majority of enterprise data will be stored in data lakes and that Upsolver will be the platform to make this data easily available in real-time. Using familiar data interfaces allows organizations to extend the use of data lakes to their existing data management teams,” Porat said.