By Sam Fort and Bill Bryant, DFJ Partners
Over the past decade, innovation in the $20+ billion market for enterprise data warehouse solutions has stagnated. Last generation offerings including Netezza, Vertica, Teradata, Greenplum, Aster Data, and ParAccel were developed in the early to mid-2000s. Beyond the newer cloud-only solutions like Amazon Redshift and Snowflake Computing, there has been precious little innovation in the category — particularly for customers seeking flexible, high-performance solutions that can deploy on-premise, in the cloud, or as a hybrid of both. For many Global 2000 companies, simply moving their petabytes and terabytes of data to the cloud doesn’t work due to cost, performance, latency, security, data sovereignty, and user experience.
Meanwhile, the theme of big data has morphed into a theme of ginormous data as the volume of digital data continues to double every two years. Enterprises are struggling to wrangle and derive value from the massive quantity of data they are generating from customers, suppliers, channels, sensors, and internal systems. The market has been aching for a new generation of analytics products that can allow enterprises to draw and act on real-time insights from their burgeoning volumes of data.
Against this backdrop, Yellowbrick Data has brought their radically performant in-memory data analytics appliance to market, and in so doing has shaken up an enterprise market ripe for a disruptive, next-generation player. Today, we are thrilled to announce that DFJ Growth is co-leading their $48 million Series B financing round.
DFJ has partnered with Yellowbrick since early in their journey. Spearheaded by Bill Bryant and Mo Islam, DFJ Venture was one of the first to see the market need for a next-generation enterprise data warehouse, initially backing the company in early 2016. A driving force for this initial bet was the stellar experience and technical chops of Yellowbrick’s founding team of Neil Carson, Mark Brinicombe, and Jim Dawson, who previously held executive roles at flash storage pioneer Fusion-io helping drive the company to IPO and eventual sale in 2014.
What caught our attention about Yellowbrick was not just the magnitude of the problem, but also the unique, game-changing capabilities of their product. With the founding team’s expertise in flash, distributed systems, and next-generation database architectures, the company has developed a solution that is capable of ingesting disparate data feeds, capturing 100,000s of rows per second, while simultaneously allowing both business users and data scientists to run complex queries at 10–140x the speed of legacy solutions. That is not a typo. Customers routinely see 100X performance increases, while no longer needing to sample data or drop historical data from the analysis. The Yellowbrick Data Warehouse appliance deploys into production in less than a day, while delivering a 97% footprint reduction versus legacy solutions, allowing customers to save on power, management, cooling, and data center costs.
Early customer feedback has been exceptional. References for the product frequently used words like “incredible,” “transformative,” and “earth-shattering.” It’s no wonder that the initial sales traction has been equally impressive, and interest has begun to surge since the company came out of stealth in July of this year. Customers are making repeat purchases, and the company is working with some of the world’s largest companies. With larger deployment sizes and a public cloud version set to arrive in 2019, we expect to see significant growth for many, many years to come.
DFJ could not be more excited to partner with Yellowbrick on their shimmering road (pun intended) to building a significant new player in the data analytics market.
