Why We Invested in Onehouse
The future of data is the universal data lakehouse.
We’re excited to announce that Craft led the $35M Series B round in Onehouse, the universal data lakehouse platform. We join existing investors Greylock and Addition to support Onehouse on its journey to deliver the most open and interoperable data lakehouse in the industry.
Big data infrastructure is a massive market that continues to grow as enterprises generate, store, and analyze increasing amounts of data for downstream use cases such as BI and applications — particularly in AI. Data architectures have relied on data warehouses and lakes, however the limits of those platforms are increasingly apparent. Warehouses are great for structured data and analytical workloads, but get expensive at scale. Data lakes are cost effective and great for unstructured data, but inefficient to manage as datasets grow larger. Organizations frequently maintain both, adding costs and risk to data integrity as data is replicated and moved between platforms.
The advent of the lakehouse has shifted the paradigm by introducing a new way to manage data, offering the best of both worlds. Lakehouses were born from the creation of table formats such as Apache Hudi, Apache Iceberg, and Delta Lake, combining data warehouse functionality with the cost effective storage of the data lake. As organizations look to store and query data in the most performant and cost effective way, there has been a rapid adoption of the data lakehouse.
The future of data is the lakehouse. So, why Onehouse? Onehouse founder Vinoth Chandar is a pioneer in the data space. While building out Uber’s data platform, he created what is now Apache Hudi, which is open sourced for anyone to use and build on. Some of the biggest enterprises are using Hudi — Uber, Walmart, Notion, ByteDance, and Robinhood to name a few. The foundations of Onehouse are interoperability and developing the most open universal lakehouse architecture. Onehouse has also developed Apache XTable (Incubating), which allows for interoperability between table formats and further prevents data silos and vendor lock-in. Onehouse is the only independent lakehouse that gives customers the flexibility to use their query engines of choice while also giving them full control of how they store their data. With this North Star of interoperability, Vinoth and team are building the most flexible and versatile architecture on the market.
Customers love Onehouse’s time to value — for busy data teams, it’s easy to get Onehouse up and running quickly and with minimal engineering effort. Many customers chose Onehouse instead of building out a data lakehouse themselves. With Onehouse, they get their lakehouse live in weeks. With real-time data freshness, powerful native data transformation capabilities, and automated table optimization, Onehouse is creating massive value for its customers.
Vinoth has assembled a team with deep experience at businesses known for their data prowess such as Confluent, Uber, Microsoft, Amazon and LinkedIn. Aligned and focused on creating the most interoperable, performant and open data architecture, the team has already made an indelible mark on the data landscape, and the journey has only just begun. We’re excited to be along for the ride.
Written by Michael Robinson and Zao Chen.
