Startup Unravel Data has raised $50 million in D-round funding to develop its data pipeline technology. What is a data pipeline and what does Unravel Data’s technology do?
Typically an application needs data which it processes, and that data can come from files or a data lake or data warehouse. There can often be a series of subsidiary processing steps needed to get selected data out from a data lake or file, reformat it, then deliver it to a target analytics application. This is the well-known ETL or Extract, Transform and Load procedure. Any ETL is an example of a data pipeline.
Kunal Agarwal, CEO of Unravel Data, said: “Just as the DevOps market united the practice of software development and operations a decade ago to transform the application lifecycle, data teams require the same kind of full-stack visibility, automation, and actionable intelligence that meet their needs around data pipeline performance, cost, and quality.”
Unravel suggests that large enterprises have to operate a large number of data pipelines used for data products, modeling, analysis, and reporting. It says the complexity of data systems is heightened by the shift to multi-cloud strategies. This inhibits the ability of data teams to deliver processing results in a timely way and doesn’t help them manage storage and cloud compute costs.
Agarwal said: “Data engineers and data scientists currently spend more than half their day debugging and troubleshooting issues on the thousands of data pipelines in their environment.”
Unravel puts forward the claim that the number of data pipelines and systems involved in them is increasing and that it make sense to manage data pipelines as a specific activity. This will “support the real-time analytics ambitions of the data-driven enterprise.”
Unravel says its Unravel Platform product is intended to “help connect the dots from every system in the modern data stack, including within and across the most popular data ecosystems such as Databricks, Snowflake, Amazon EMR, BigQuery, and Dataproc.”
It claims customers who have deployed Unravel have been able to double productivity of data teams and ensure data applications run on time while being able to scale cost efficiently in the cloud. The customer roster includes Fortune 100 companies, including two of the top five global pharmaceutical companies and three of the top 10 financial institutions in the world.
The funding round was led by Third Point Ventures LLC, with participation from Bridge Bank and existing investors that include Menlo Ventures, Point 72, GGV Capital, and Harmony Capital, bringing the total amount of funding raised by Unravel Data to $107 million.
