10 Years of Imply: From Apache Druid to What’s Next in Real-Time Analytics

We’ve officially hit double digits!

Ten years ago, a few Druid-obsessed engineers asked a radical question:

What if analytics didn’t have to be slow, stale, or stuck in dashboards?

Back then, we were just a small team solving our own problem—creating Apache Druid to get real-time answers from massive streams of data. Today, Imply powers some of the fastest, most interactive data experiences on the planet.

• Real-time dashboards? Check.
• Subsecond search at scale? Absolutely.
• Wild use cases no one saw coming? Every day.

Druid now fuels critical analytics at organizations around the world—and Imply has grown into a full platform that’s changing how people interact with data.

This year, we’re celebrating a decade of progress, partnership, and pushing boundaries. And we’re just getting started.

It Started With a Problem—and an Idea

Before Imply, there was Druid.

“We were trying to answer a simple question: How do you get instant answers from massive streams of data without breaking the bank? Druid was the result—and it turned out we weren’t the only ones who needed it.”
— Fangjin Yang, Co-founder & CEO

That idea—interactive queries on event data at scale—sparked a new kind of database. Apache Druid broke the mold, offering subsecond performance across real-time and historical data, all while keeping infrastructure costs in check.

It was open source from day one. And the community took it further than we could’ve imagined.

From a Database to a Movement

In 2015, we founded Imply—not just to commercialize Druid, but to reimagine what analytics could be.

“We didn’t just want to package Druid—we wanted to rethink the entire analytics experience. That meant staying open, staying developer-first, and solving real, hard problems.”
— Gian Merlino, Co-founder & CTO

Over the past decade, we’ve:

Contributed hundreds of Druid features and improvements
From Multi-Stage Query (MSQ) and schema-on-persist to async queries on S3, we’ve helped Druid mature into a true event database—built for flexible ingestion, long-term historical analysis, and real-time performance at scale—without breaking the bank.

Launched Polaris, the easiest way to run Druid in the cloud
Built from the ground up as a fully managed, cloud-native service, Polaris makes Druid accessible to any team—without the operational overhead.

Raised over $215 million from leading investors
Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and others, we’ve scaled our team, product, and global reach—while staying true to our open-source roots.

Enabled real-time analytics at the world’s most innovative companies
From fraud detection at Ibotta to operational visibility at Reddit, our customers span finance, tech, retail, media, and beyond—powering analytics where milliseconds matter.

Grown a global community of engineers, architects, and builders
What started as a few engineers in an apartment is now a worldwide movement—20,000+ GitHub stars, 100M+ Docker pulls, and 600+ contributors later—spanning thousands of Druid users, community meetups, and Imply customers pushing the limits of what’s possible. In 2024, we brought that energy together at our first in-person Druid Summit.

And through it all, we’ve stayed true to the values that sparked this journey: performance, simplicity, and scale.

What’s next:  A New Layer Is Taking Shape

As data systems grow more complex, real-time analytics and observability can’t afford to be disconnected—or slow.

We’re building a smarter foundation—one that brings speed, efficiency, and openness to the tools teams already use.

“We’re building for a world where real-time is table stakes—and observability needs a smarter foundation. That means rethinking the data layer itself.”
— Vadim Ogievetsky, Co-founder & Chief Experience Officer

We think the next 10 years will look very different from the last—and we’re excited to help shape that future.

To our Customers and the Community: Thank You

Whether you contributed to Druid, built on Imply, joined our team, or simply cheered us on—thank you. Open source only works because of the people behind it.

“It’s been amazing to see how far this community has come. Druid started with a handful of us in a tiny apartment. Now it’s powering apps we could never have imagined.”
— Fangjin Yang

This milestone is yours, too.

Here’s to the Next 10

We started with a distributed database. Now, we’re building something bigger—a new foundation for analytics when real-time truly matters.

“We built Druid on the belief that infrastructure should solve real-world technical problems. Ten years in, we’ve learned that’s just the starting point—true impact comes from solving market-defining challenges. We have the hubris to believe we’ve identified the core problem facing observability and security data teams—and we’re building the product to change the game.”
— Eric Tschetter, Chief Officer of Emerging Solutions

Thanks for riding the event stream with us. The next decade? Even wilder.

And the best part? We’re just getting warmed up.

Stay tuned.