Spark, Kafka, Parquet, Airflow; there has been a lot of innovation in the data infrastructure world over the past half-decade and these new technologies are transformational. They promise to provide insights at hyper speed that can transform business decisioning and insights. After talking to dozens of customers, we have started to realize a lot of enterprises are enamored by this prospect but lack the talent / resources to utilize these technologies. Customers are yearning for a vendor to provide out of the box functionality that helps them get faster insights out of their petabytes of data.
Many enterprises have a lot of data, but few understand how to utilize it efficiently. Or, they know what kind of insights they’d like to gain, but there are barriers preventing them from obtaining this knowledge. Often, data analysis can be costly, resource-intensive, or just too complex.
One of the reasons we invested in Incorta was to help customers address these challenges, and we are excited to continue to support them as they raise their $30M Series C investment round.
Who is Incorta?
As the first no-extract-transform-load (ETL) database, Incorta is quickly becoming a leader in the industry. ETL is a database type in which data is moved from one database to another. With Incorta’s Direct Data Mapping, data can be ingested in its original form and analyzed without requiring modeling or ETL overhead.
Without that overhead, companies gain query results quickly – in a matter of minutes compared to several days or weeks. According to Incorta, customers have experienced speeds that are 1000x times faster than legacy systems on billions of rows. And that speed doesn’t come with a high price tag. In fact, Incorta’s solution on average costs 5% less than legacy analytics systems.
Its analytics framework allows organizations to run next-generation technologies on mission-critical transactional data. This includes data such as financial reporting data, procurement and supply chain data, and HR data.
Its most recent improvement includes an optimized SQL interface that allows for SQL-based business intelligence (BI) tools – such as Tableau, MicroStrategy, and BusinessObjectives – to connect to its back end. Incorta hopes that this will allow organizations to give existing BI tools a performance boost, while preserving their initial investment in those tools.
Incorta is planning on even more performance enhancements for its next release. With a new funding round having been recently completed, the company is well positioned to deliver on this.
Incorta raises $30 million in Series C funding
On August 15, the company completed a $30 million Series C funding round. The round was led by Sorenson Capital. Other participating investors alongside Telstra Ventures include GV, Kleiner Perkins, M12 (previously Microsoft Ventures), and Ron Wahl. As of this funding round, the company has raised $75 million.
“As businesses race to become more data-driven and make real-time decisions across every aspect of their business, the volume and complexity of their data simply cannot be handled by the traditional ETL-based data warehouses,” said Osama Elkady, co-founder and CEO, Incorta. “This new funding, paired with explosive revenue and customer growth, provides a clear line of sight to grow the business and continue to drive innovation to meet growing customer demand.”
It plans to use the funding to hire more employees, invest in its Direct Data Mapping technology, and deepen its relationship with major public cloud providers in order to allow for rapid deployment and reduced operational costs.
Incorta has seen significant growth and hit several company milestones
In addition to the product improvements mentioned above, the company has experienced a few other significant milestones in the last year. It has experienced 284 percent year-over-year growth in 12 months, added 200 new employees over the last six months, and gained new expansion deals with customers in industries such as financial services, retail, and manufacturing.
Incorta has also been selected as one of the 12 startups that Microsoft is actively promoting as a part of its Microsoft AppSource certification.
A leadership team with experience
The company was founded in 2013 by three entrepreneurs who were experienced in building reporting and analytics solutions for companies.
The founders – Osama Elkady (CEO), Klaus Fabian (CTO), and Hichem Sellami (VP of Applications) – all came from Oracle. Other Oracle alums include Incorta’s chief evangelist and VP of Product, Matthew Halliday, who worked in a number of sales and development roles at Oracle, and Wael Fakharany, the VP and general manager of EMEA, who previously held a senior position at Oracle. The company’s COO, Ziyad Dahbour, was the founder of TierData (acq. By Informatica).
The company’s strong leadership has led them to see great success. Incorta’s solutions are currently in use at companies such as Starbucks, Broadcom, and Genworth Financial. By using Incorta’s technology, these companies were able to gather insights on their data at unprecedented speeds.
Saad Siddiqui, Principal at Telstra Ventures
Saad joined Telstra Ventures in 2016 and focuses on early to late stage venture investments in enterprise and infrastructure. He has led TV’s investments in NS1, Ripcord, Cofense, Incorta and Boomtown.
Saad enjoys helping enterprise technology teams tackle business challenges of creating a product that users love and scaling up their business.
Prior to joining Telstra Ventures, Saad was an executive at Informatica where he led various acquisitions, venture investments, partnerships and product strategy. Earlier in his career, Saad worked at Cisco Ventures & Corporate Development and worked as an investment banker at RBC Capital Markets and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.