Startup raises capital to dismantle auto lock-in from data vendors

US tech startup e6data has announced that it aims to disrupt the data analytics and AI market by having raised funding for technology to dismantle auto lock-in from data analytics vendors.

In today’s digital-first landscape, enterprises rely on powerful data and AI capabilities to fuel innovation, enhance customer experiences, and optimise operations. However, they are set to spend a staggering US$100 billion in 2024 on data intelligence platforms to derive value from their own data. In response, the California-based company has announced a US$10 million funding round as it aims to halve the bill of businesses seeking to analyse their own data. The series A funding round was led by Accel Partners with participation from Beenext and others.

Data intelligence platforms allow enterprises to get insights from their own data to make business decisions and serve workloads including data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and now generative AI. But with the growing volume of data and the need to extract maximum value from it, enterprises will be looking at a sizable bill to utilise this data, according to e6data. The total addressable market (TAM) for data and AI solutions is slated to touch US$230 billion in 2025, with 60% of CXOs planning to increase their spending over the next year.

“This rapid increase has made data intelligence platforms the second largest IT spending category, behind only cloud spend for operational systems and application infrastructure,’ said Vishnu Vasanth, co-founder and CEO. “It’s fuelling the meteoric rise of data warehouse and data lakehouse companies such as Snowflake and Databricks, and the rapid growth of corresponding offerings from AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.”

However, as the spending grows, ROI concerns are reaching a boiling point. Enterprise technology leaders need a way to simultaneously increase performance and access new capabilities, while simultaneously controlling costs. They increasingly find there are no compelling alternatives to the status quo and are wary of emerging forms of ecosystem lock-in.

“Legitimate ROI concerns stand in the way of enterprises realising the full potential of data and AI,” Vasanth said. “Moreover, organisations cannot freely move lakehouse table formats, data catalogues, compute providers and cloud providers without adverse price-performance impacts, the need for data movement, and cumbersome application migrations.

“We aim to address this through our work at e6data.”

To address these challenges, e6data has developed a new breed of ‘compute engine’ for data intelligence platforms that the company says helps enterprises amplify ROI on their existing platforms and architectures and escape ecosystem lock-in; all with zero friction to adoption in the form of zero data movement, zero application migration and zero down-time.

e6data plans to expand access to its Lighthouse Customer Program, which offers the e6data solution as a managed service for the heaviest or most pressing use-cases of enterprise customers, complete with production support and professional services.

Data intelligence platforms like data lakehouses and warehouses are the foundation of all analytics and AI. At their core, they use distributed ‘compute engines’, whether open-source or vendor-backed, for every form of processing spanning ingestion, transformation, dashboards, reports, ML model training and inference, as well as RAG-based generative AI applications.

However, existing compute engines are built on monolithic architectures with centralised components for most aspects of a query or job’s lifecycle. This creates challenges with respect to cost, performance, concurrency handling, and uptime — particularly on compute-intensive heavy workloads that enterprises increasingly encounter as they operate at production scale.

e6data’s founding team saw an opportunity to address these gaps with a new engine architecture and distributed processing model that is disaggregated, decentralised and Kubernetes-native. The company says the e6data engine outperforms leading commercial and open-source solutions across real-world heavy workloads and popular benchmarks, with five times higher performance, total cost of ownership (TCO) savings of more than 50%, and a truly format-neutral approach that negates ecosystem lock-in.

e6data has already signed up publicly listed Fortune 500 enterprises as well as high growth companies as customers. With its offering, e6data hopes to level the playing field for customers by negating the immense pricing power a handful of vendors enjoy due to various new forms of compute ecosystem lock-in at different layers of the data stack.

Image credit: iStock.com/adventtr