By Steve Harrick, Alex Lim, and Jason Kong
IVP is excited to announce our Series C investment in Yellowbrick Data, a data warehouse solution built for the analytic needs of the world’s largest enterprises! As data volumes continue to explode and data analytics have evolved from a nice to have to a business critical application for decision-making, enterprises need high performance, flexible and reliable data warehouses more than ever. As a result, companies in every major vertical have turned to Yellowbrick, and those customers are now seeing radical improvements in analytic performance along with significantly reduced operating costs. We believe that Yellowbrick’s solution has the potential to change the paradigm in data warehousing forever. Here is why we invested:
Built for the Global 2000
Yellowbrick was founded on a simple principle: to win over the Global 2000, analytics solutions need to have the quality, concurrency, compatibility, support, and ecosystem integration enterprises expect, and then outperform incumbents on both price and performance. With this in mind, the founding team built a standards-based, full-stack, enterprise data warehouse that takes advantage of the capacity, speed, and concurrency benefits of flash technologies. The result is a product that quite simply blows the competition out of the water on the order of 10–100x. When we spoke to Yellowbrick’s customers, there was a common refrain: “I didn’t believe Yellowbrick’s claims around price/performance … until I saw it with my own eyes!” The word is getting out, and demand for Yellowbrick from the world’s largest enterprises is off the charts.
A Massive Market in Flux
Data warehousing is a long-established, $20 billion market, but is undergoing significant changes. The sunsetting of Netezza, a widely-used legacy product, along with the emergence of the cloud are driving enterprises to take a fresh look at their data warehouse solutions. While it is difficult to predict exactly how the market changes over the next decade, we are believers that enterprises will embrace hybrid infrastructures, purchasing the best-of-breed technology across on-premises, private cloud, and the public cloud. Yellowbrick is purpose-built for this new paradigm and delivers its market-leading price/performance in whichever deployment model the customer prefers.
A World-Class Team
Few teams in the world would have the audacity, technical ability, and perseverance to re-build the enterprise data warehouse from the ground up, and most technologists would consider it an incredible undertaking. Led by its brilliant, experienced, and charismatic CEO, Neil Carson, Yellowbrick has assembled a technical team of the foremost experts in analytics that has done exactly that and more. IVP is thrilled to join Neil, his team, and excellent venture investors like DFJ Growth, GV, Menlo Ventures, Next47, Third Point Ventures, Samsung, and BMW i Ventures, on a journey down the Yellowbrick road!
Steve Harrick, Alex Lim, and Jason Kong are investors at IVP, a later-stage venture firm based in Menlo Park, CA.
