Imply Raises $30M in Series B funding at $350M Valuation

I’m excited to announce that Imply has raised a $30M Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Geodesic Capital and Khosla Ventures. We are excited to partner again with A16Z as the lead investor to continue to build out the company, and we look forward to working closely with Geodesic Capital towards international expansion.

Our vision at Imply has always been to reduce the time to insight and enable faster time to action for businesses both large and small. We started on our journey in the open source world with Apache Druid, a high performance, real-time analytics database. Druid excels at powering use cases where low latency is critical, such as in fraud and risk analytics, user behavior tracking, and operational analytics.

Druid provides significantly better performance for data ingest and data querying when compared to legacy technologies such as data warehouses. Druid was architected as a “fast in, fast out” database; it can ingest millions of events per second, and it delivers sub-second query response, even against petabyte-sized datasets. Over the last few years, we’ve seen companies increasingly adopt event-driven and streaming architectures, and as a result, we’ve seen rapid growth in the number of companies using Druid and diversity of Druid use cases. Today, Druid runs in production at some of the world’s largest enterprises and at data-driven startups alike, and crosses numerous verticals including finance, retail, telecommunications, manufacturing, healthcare, media, hospitability, transportation, networking, security, and much more.

From the grass roots open source growth of Druid, we learned about the broad market need for low latency analytics, and founded Imply to build a true enterprise-ready product to fill that need. The team at Imply has done an incredible job on executing that vision. Today, Imply offers a full real-time analytics solution, with Druid as the core engine complemented by a powerful operational UI, built-in performance analytics, and enterprise-grade security. We also offer fully managed solutions for public (AWS) and private (Kubernetes) clouds for easy deployment and operational management.

Although our Series B funding round was opportunistic – we had spent less than 10% of our Series A – we plan to use the funds to aggressively pursue our vision. The financing will accelerate product development and the company’s go-to-market expansion. Of course, we remain true to our open source roots and are fully committed to continue building value for the open source community.

We have grand plans for Druid and Imply in the coming months. Today, we also announced the inaugural Druid Summit, a forum for that will bring the Druid community together face-to-face. Support for JOINs, the community’s most popular feature request is under development, and we expect to formally deliver an upcoming release as Druid 1.0.

Of course we are also hiring across all functions, so if you are interested in being a part of this adventure, check out https://imply.io/careers!