Data Lake Startup Dremio Hits $2 Billion Valuation With Latest Funding

Series E round of $160 million comes just one year after the company’s last round and brings its total funding to more than $421 million.

Data lakehouse platform developer Dremio has raised $160 million in a round of venture funding that puts the big data startup’s pre-money valuation at $2 billion, the company said Tuesday.

The Series E funding round comes as the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company says it has “achieved breakout velocity” by doubling its revenue for several years in a row and has accelerated its hiring in the last year, the company said in a statement. Dremio lists such companies as Airbus, Goldman Sachs and Unilever as customers.

Dremio develops SQL data query software based on Apache Arrow, an open-source development framework for in-memory analytics. With the increasing use of data lakes for data science, data engineering and data analytics tasks, Dremio has positioned itself as a data lake engine platform provider.

[Related: Dremio Looks To Recruit, Enable SI And Consultant Partners With Channel Program Launch]

“The market momentum towards cloud data lakes is now irrefutable. The only question left is how quickly customers can take advantage of these modern open data architectures,” said Dremio CEO Billy Bosworth, in a statement.

“Our solutions allow you to run lightning-fast queries directly on your data lake. They work whether you have data sources in multiple clouds, on-prem, and/or in other SQL databases, and that is what customers find so compelling – we meet them wherever they are in their journey,” Bosworth concluded.

Dremio, founded in 2015, is competing with a growing wave of cloud data lake analytics providers, most notably fast-growing Databricks along with Snowflake, Cloudera, and public cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. (In August Databricks raised $1.6 billion in a funding round that put its value at $38 billion.)

Data lake technology developers promote the use of data lakes as an alternative to traditional data warehouse systems for data analytics tasks.

The new Series E funding round comes just one year after Dremio raised $135 million in a round led by Sapphire Ventures in January 2021. The latest round was led by new investor Adams Street Partners with participation from new investors StepStone Group and DTCP, along with existing investors Sapphire Ventures, Insight Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Cisco Investments.

Altogether Dremio has raised a total of $421.5 million in funding, according to the Crunchbase website.

Dremio said the new funding will help the company accelerate its technology development efforts, grow its customer-facing organization, contribute to open-source initiatives, and “invest heavily in educating and enabling a growing community of data lake practitioners.”

“A top priority for every business leader today is to become a data-driven company,” said Brian Dudley, partner at Adams Street Partners, in a statement. “But data teams are being asked to do the impossible: provide faster time to insights, make all data consumers more self-sufficient, ensure data governance and security, and promote an open architecture to avoid vendor lock-in, all while reducing infrastructure complexity and costs. We believe Dremio is leading the way to empower companies to become data-driven.”