Imply Raises $100MM in Series D funding

What started as three friends working around a desk in a tiny San Francisco apartment has become a unicorn. I’m excited to announce that Imply has raised a $100MM Series D funding round led by Thoma Bravo growth, with participation from OMERS, and our existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and Khosla Ventures. We are excited to partner with and learn from TB, one of the world’s most respected growth equity and PE firms. 

Gian, Vadim, I, and the whole company couldn’t be more grateful for everyone that participated in this round. It’s because of their conviction in Imply that we continue on our mission to enable developers to build next-gen analytic applications. It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come.

Speaking of progress, the past year has been one of tremendous growth at Imply. We’ve been heads down on not just one, but two major product initiatives. We recently announced Project Shapeshift, a one year initiative to redefine Apache Druid and what is possible with real-time analytics databases. While 1000s of companies are already using Druid, our goal is to greatly expand what Druid can do and to rebuild it with a new underlying framework, including a new multi-stage query engine. In doing so, we’ll enable many new capabilities, including:

• SQL-based data ingestion

• SQL-based batch and streaming data transformation (built-in ETL)

• Multi-stage queries, including the ability to do larger subqueries and joins

• Optional separation of compute and storage

Over the last few months, we’ve been building out and partnering with numerous organizations to test these new capabilities. I’m very excited that the first major release will be coming in the next few months, where we will be open sourcing the first phase of our work. Druid will be the first and only real-time analytics database to not only have incredibly fast queries, native streaming data ingest, and high scalability, but also be able to handle complex multi-stage queries, separate compute and storage, and be able to load data without requiring an external data pipeline.

Our second major focus at Imply has been the launch of Imply Polaris, an enterprise ready version of our product. Polaris isn’t just Druid as a SaaS – it offers expanded capabilities in enterprise security, performance monitoring, and advanced analytic queries that aren’t found in open source. Despite only launching Polaris two months ago, we now have many customers up and running, many of whom adopted the product completely via self-service.

With the new Series D, we plan to continue to invest even more in Druid’s new engine, Polaris, and building the Druid community. Our biggest focus will continue to be making developers successful. Today, every company is becoming a technology company and then every company is also becoming a data driven company. Now more than ever, developers are empowered to make critical business decisions, becoming the focal point for key business initiatives that really move organizations forward. At Imply, we believe developers are the new heroes of analytics but they’re so much more. They’re heroes of their respective organizations. With that in mind, our major product initiatives are all designed to make evaluating, operating, and deploying Druid increasingly easier, while providing more tools for developers to build analytic applications their companies need to be successful. 

The Series D is a major milestone in our journey, and wouldn’t be possible without the hard work of everyone at Imply and the trust and partnership of our customers. I couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve accomplished to date. We have hundreds of customers. We’re truly a global team. Sometimes it feels completely surreal. But we have ambitious plans of where we want to take the product and the road ahead is sure to be filled with fun and difficult challenges. 

If you are interested in data, analytics, or just the overall startup experience, we are hiring across all functions and want to talk to you! Please check out https://imply.io/careers for more information.