In today’s digital-first landscape, enterprises rely on powerful
data and AI capabilities to fuel innovation, enhance customer
experiences, and optimize operations. However, they are set to
spend a staggering $100b in 2024 on data intelligence platforms to
derive value from their own data. Laser focused on the skyrocketing
compute for data intelligence, e6data is today announcing a $10m
funding round as it offers superior processing efficiencies that
halves the bill of enterprises seeking to analyze their vast troves
of data. The series A funding round was led by Accel with
participation from Beenext and others.
Data intelligence platforms are critical to enterprises seeking
to extract value from their hundreds of data sources through
essential workloads like data engineering, BI and analytics,
machine learning, and now generative AI. As the imperative to
extract maximum value from this data intensifies, enterprises face
constant overruns and acute performance tradeoffs as they seek to
effectively utilize their data. The total addressable market (TAM)
for data and AI solutions is slated to touch $230 billion in 2025,
with 60% of CXOs expecting to increase their spend over the next
year.
The e6data team is laser focused on data intelligence
platforms
Vishnu Vasanth, co-founder and CEO commented: “This rapid
increase has made data intelligence platforms the second largest IT
spending category – behind only cloud spend for operational systems
and application infrastructure. It’s fueling the meteoric rise of
data warehouse and data lakehouse companies such as Snowflake and
Databricks, and the rapid growth of corresponding offerings from
AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud”.
However, as the spending grows, ROI concerns are reaching a
boiling point. Enterprise technology leaders need a way to
simultaneously increase performance and access new capabilities,
while simultaneously controlling costs. They increasingly find
there are no compelling alternatives to the status quo and are wary
of emerging forms of ecosystem lock-in. “Legitimate ROI concerns
stand in the way of enterprises realizing the full potential of
data & AI. Moreover, organizations cannot freely move lakehouse
table formats, data catalogs, compute providers, and cloud
providers without adverse price-performance impacts, the need for
data movement, and cumbersome application migrations. We aim to
address this through our work at e6data” added Vishnu
Vasanth.
e6data walks the talk on ROI for enterprises
To address these challenges, e6data has developed a new breed of
“compute engine” for data intelligence platforms that helps
enterprises amplify ROI on their existing platforms and
architectures and escape ecosystem lock-in; all with zero friction
to adoption in the form of zero data movement, zero application
migration, and zero down-time.
e6data plans to expand access to its Design Partner Program,
which offers the e6data solution as a managed service for the
heaviest or most pressing use-cases of enterprise customers,
complete with production support and professional services.
Data intelligence platforms like data lakehouses and warehouses
are the foundation of all analytics and AI. At their core, they use
distributed “compute engines”, whether open-source or
vendor-backed, for every form of processing spanning
ingestion, transformation, dashboards, reports, ML model training
and inference, as well as RAG-based generative AI applications.
However, existing compute engines are built on monolithic
architectures with centralized components for most aspects of a
query or job’s life cycle. This creates challenges with respect to
cost, performance, concurrency handling, and scalability -
particularly on compute-intensive heavy workloads that enterprises
increasingly encounter as they operate at production scale.
e6data’s founding team saw an opportunity to address these gaps
with a new engine architecture and distributed processing model
that is disaggregated, decentralized, dynamic, and
Kubernetes-native. The e6data engine outperforms leading commercial
and open-source solutions across real-world heavy workloads and
popular benchmarks: 5x higher performance, total cost of ownership
(TCO) savings of more than 50%, and a truly format-neutral approach
that negates ecosystem lock-in.
With a multi-disciplinary mix of distributed systems engineers,
database builders, open source committers, and go-to-market leaders
from Microsoft, ThoughtWorks, IBM DB2, Cisco, SAP, and
Thoughtworks, the e6data team’s prior experiences in over 100+
large-scale data intelligence platforms gave them a first-hand view
of the changing technology landscape, and the challenges facing
enterprises as they scaled their data & AI
needs.
e6data has already signed up publicly listed Fortune 500
enterprises as well as high growth companies as customers. It is
anticipating explosive growth due to rising demand for
compute-intensive heavy workloads across high-volume data products
(e.g. customer-facing and business dashboards, reports), advanced
analytics on near real-time data (personalization, fraud/risk,
inventory planning), and production-grade generative AI
applications (e.g. RAG for search, recommendation, customer
support).
Data platform spend is already the top 2 CXO spend. However, the
largest and fastest-growing spend drivers are typically from
strategically important, nondiscretionary workloads.
According to Gartner, more than 80% of enterprises will be gen
AI in production by 2026 which will further fuel the need for
e6data’s high-efficiency, format-neutral compute infrastructure
offering.
Rajaraman Santhanam, COO of Chargebee added: "We’ve been
collaborating with e6data across several internal and
external-facing analytics use cases, all built on Chargebee’s
multi-purpose, scalable data lakehouse platform. We are
seeing exciting opportunities to innovate for our customers. We
have successfully supported concurrencies of over 1,000 QPS on near
real-time (NRT) data and complex queries while maintaining client
latencies of less than 2 seconds. Other lakehouse engines we
evaluated struggled to achieve this level of performance and
scalability, despite being more resource intensive.”
While Rajeev Purohit, Head of Platform Engineering at
Freshworks said: "We have been impressed with e6data’s
performance, concurrency, and scalability on some of our heaviest
use cases as part of our evaluation and co-creation of a
next-generation data platform. Their team has been knowledgeable
and responsive to our product needs through our collaboration on
cutting-edge open lakehouse architectures.”
With its unique offering, e6data hopes to level the playing
field for customers by negating the immense pricing power a handful
of vendors enjoy due to various new forms of compute ecosystem
lock-in at different layers of the data stack. Organizations cannot
freely move lakehouse table formats, data catalogs, compute
providers, and cloud providers without adverse price-performance
impacts, the need for data movement, and cumbersome application
migrations.
Shekhar Kirani, Partner at Accel, commented: “With GenAI,
enterprises are seeing a surge in analytics use cases. Over the
next few years, we expect every individual in an organization to be
a power data consumer, implying a higher load on analytics and
compute infrastructure. We believe e6data is primed to leverage and
accelerate this movement.”
Ends
Media images can be found here.
About e6datae6data is a startup that has developed a
high-performance lakehouse compute engine for enterprise data
analytics. Founded in 2021 by a team of experienced technologists,
e6data helps amplify ROI on their existing platforms and
architectures and escape ecosystem lock-in; e6data’s new generation
of SQL engines powers 5x higher performance, 50% lower Total Cost
of Ownership and zero-friction adoption. The product integrates
seamlessly with all major data lakehouse formats, data catalogs and
governance frameworks, SQL standards and dialects, and object
stores, and cloud providers. It has a team strength of over 60 and
has signed up publicly listed Fortune 500 enterprises as well as
unlisted unicorns and decacorns as customers. For more, visit:
https://e6data.com/
About AccelAccel is a global venture capital firm that
aims to be the first partner to exceptional teams everywhere, from
inception through all phases of private company growth. Accel has
been operating in India since 2008, and its investments include
companies like BookMyShow, Browserstack, Flipkart, Freshworks,
FalconX, Infra.Market, Chargebee, Clevertap, Cure Fit, Musigma,
Moneyview, Mensa Brands, Myntra, Moglix, Ninjacart, Swiggy, Stanza
Living, Urban Company, Zetwerk, and Zenoti, among many others. We
help ambitious entrepreneurs build iconic global businesses. For
more, visit: www.accel.com
For further information please contact the e6data press office: Bilal Mahmood on b.mahmood@stockwoodstrategy.com or +44 (0) 771 400 7257.