Announcing Imply: An Enterprise Solution for Druid and Interactive Analytics at Scale

Today, Gian Merlino, Vadim Ogievetsky, and I are extremely excited to announce Imply, a company for interactive analytics at scale, centered around the Druid open source data store.

We first began working on Druid at a startup called Metamarkets, and over the last few years, we’ve been proud to watch the project grow and take on a life of its own.excerptEnd Our initial goal was to enable users to arbitrarily explore and aggregate data, and have visualizations update as fast as users could navigate through the data. We needed a data store that could support interactivity at scale. We experimented with relational databases, but found them to be too slow; key/value stores, but found them too inflexible; and multiple enterprise solutions that just didn’t make the cut. Druid came into existence to fill a gap in the data world, and was architected with a few key attributes in mind: sub-second queries so users can explore data without breaking their workflow, streaming data ingestion so events can be explored immediately after they occur, and complete flexibility in how data can be explored.

After we open sourced Druid, people began using it for everything from analyzing ad-tech, network traffic, website usage, finance, and sensor data. We’ve come a long way over the past few years in terms of both adoption and scale. Existing Druid clusters now scale to petabytes of raw data, trillions of events, and millions of daily queries. Druid is now being used for everything from business intelligence to A/B testing and funnel analysis, and we are still discovering new use cases every day. As the Druid community has grown, we are also learning about what we can do better. There is still plenty of overhead to learning the system, tuning it properly, and properly monitoring things in production. Thankfully, we now have the opportunity to build Druid for the world.

We’re happy to announce that we’ve raised \$2M in seed funding from Khosla Ventures, and Ari Zilka, former CTO of Hortonworks, will be joining our board. With this fundraising, we will be devoting our energy to make it as easy as possible for people to use Druid and build awesome data applications on top of it. Our first product, the Imply Analytics Platform, is ready for download today. The platform is completely free and open source, and is designed to make Druid much easier to install and use. Furthermore, we’ve created and included Pivot, a powerful UI for data exploration, and PlyQL, a SQL-like query language.

There’s still a lot of hard work that needs to be done on the project and the surrounding ecosystem, but we’re excited to get started! If you are interested in Imply, Druid, general data infrastructure, or joining us on this adventure, please don’t hesitate to reach out!