Materialize, the streaming SQL database company, today announced $60 million in Series C funding, bringing the company’s total funding to over $100 million. The round was led by Logan Bartlett from Redpoint Ventures, with additional investors including Kleiner Perkins, who led the Series B, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, who led the Series A.
The new round of funding occurs against a backdrop of steady business growth for Materialize and shows the strength of the market demand for true real-time data streaming solutions. The funding will be used to further accelerate the development and adoption of Materialize’s industry-leading data streaming technology.
“Streaming data is driving the most innovative applications and services being built today.” said Arjun Narayan, co-founder and CEO, Materialize. “This funding is validation in our mission to make it simple for any business to use streaming data without the cost and complexity of using non-standard languages or custom microservices that are expensive to build and hard to maintain.”
A recent IDC Global Datasphere report estimates that over 138 zetabytes of new data will be created in 2024, of which 24% is expected to be real-time data. However, most businesses today are limited in how fast they can generate data-driven insights due to batch-oriented data pipelines or clunky software. The adoption of real-time data streaming is enabling organizations to quickly pivot resources and respond to business events in real-time, with precision and efficiency.
Materialize is the first standard SQL interface for streaming data available to engineers, allowing them to build complex queries and multiway joins without needing any specialized skills or microservices. Unlike other streaming data platforms that claim to be real-time, Materialize computes and incrementally maintains data as it is generated so query results are accessible the moment they are needed. This approach provides businesses with correct answers in milliseconds.
In the past six months, Materialize has grown its developer community to over 980 people and attracted a wide range of new customers including Density, an IoT-focused space utilization company, and Kepler Cheuvreux, an independent European financial services company.
“After trial-and-erroring multiple SQL streaming solutions, we landed on Materialize as the only streaming solution capable of integrating with our existing third-party applications and business intelligence tools,” said Jean-François Perreton, head of algo quant at Kepler Cheuvreux. “Other solutions in the market were only able to generate real-time insights for select parts of a SQL query. However, Materialize could support our existing Postgres workflow without a significant ramp-up or additional training.”
“Before using Materialize, data in many of our internal tools was often hours or days out of date, and requests often took multiple seconds,” said Ryan Gaus, software engineer at Density. “After adopting Materialize, data is nearly real-time (lag being measured in seconds) and request times are now in the hundreds of milliseconds. Our customer success team’s job has been made significantly easier.”
Founded in 2019, the Materialize team includes engineers who were early employees of Cockroach Labs, Dropbox, Stripe, Ververica and YouTube. The company’s workforce grew 63% in the past six months, attracting talent from companies including DigitalOcean, Datadog, and Google.
Materialize will use a portion of the funding to expand its engineering team across the U.S. and internationally. Given its current high-growth period, Materialize just opened a new headquarters this month in Slack’s former New York City office, where it hopes to continue growing into the office’s 85 desk spaces.
“Materialize is well positioned to become the industry standard for working with real-time data,” said Logan Bartlett, managing director, Redpoint Ventures. “The team has been studying this problem for close to a decade and truly understands the challenges engineers face when building with streaming data.” Other data company success stories in Redpoint’s portfolio include Snowflake, Cockroach Labs and Looker.
“Materialize brings the SQL experience users have grown accustomed to when working with batch data, to the world of streaming applications,” said Bucky Moore, partner, Kleiner Perkins. “We are excited to be deepening our commitment to help Materialize accelerate its ability to deliver on its vision of making real-time data accessible to all.”
Materialize Cloud is available now in open beta and Materialize is offering a free 30-day trial. For more information or to sign up, visit http://materialize.com/materialize-cloud/.
About Materialize
Based in New York City, Materialize is the streaming database company that makes it easy for any developer or analyst to understand real-time data, answer complex questions and build intelligent applications.