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December 10, 2019

Druid Developer Ramps Cloud-Native Approach

A real-time analytics startup founded by the authors of the Apache Druid database have raised additional funding as they ramp up product development based on the open-source data store.

Imply said it has raised $30 million in a funding round led by investors Andreessen Horowitz along with Geodesic Capital and Khosla Ventures. The latest funding round announced on Tuesday (Dec. 10) brings the startup’s venture capital total $45.3 million. Imply claims a valuation of $350 million.

The analytics startup based on Burlingame California, characterized the funding round as “opportunistic” since it has thus far spent less than 10 percent of its Series A funding.

Founded in 2015 by the creators of Apache Druid, the column-oriented in-memory database, Imply is ramping up development of its Druid-based analytics engine to deliver real-time queries against huge data lakes. The high-speed query and data ingestion capabilities are aimed at applications like fraud detection, supply chain events and Internet of Things device interactions.

The startup’s founders note that real-time analytics based on Apache Druid are gaining traction among hyper-scalers such as Lyft (NASDAQ: LYFT), Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) and Pinterest (NYSE: PINS). “True real-time analytics unlock many use cases that legacy systems such as data warehouses are not designed to support,” said Fangjin Yang, CEO and co-founder of Imply.

Imply said its Druid distribution runs on public or private clouds, either as a hosted or managed service. It also natively integrates with streaming applications running on Apache Kafka or Amazon Kinesis along with Hadoop file systems, Amazon and Google cloud storage.

The cloud-native distribution also is touted as delivering real-time data ingestion, interactive OLAP queries within time-series data and visualizations for event-driven and streaming data. Among the programming languages support by Druid are Python, R, Ruby and Scala.

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