Imply Raises $70MM in Series C funding

I’m excited to announce that Imply has raised a $70MM Series C funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Tiger Global Management, and our existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Geodesic Capital, and Khosla Ventures. We are excited to partner with and learn from BVP, the world’s oldest VC firm, as our lead investor. We are also very grateful towards everyone that participated in this round in their conviction in Imply as it continues to grow towards its full potential.

Our vision at Imply has always been to create a new category for data analytics, analytics-in-motion, and enable organizations to unlock workflows they’ve never been able to do before. With the most recent round of funding, we have exciting plans to more aggressively expand our product development and go-to-market motions. In particular, we’ll be soon rolling out Imply SaaS, which will include significantly expanded and simplified data modeling, data ingestion, and query optimization capabilities. We’ll also be unveiling some major developments we’ve been working on for months on Apache Druid, which will greatly expand the applications of the platform. Stay tuned for more announcements!

When we first started on our journey in creating Apache Druid, we never imagined all the use cases we would discover. Druid was designed at its core to power a new type of user experience, one where end users can interactively and arbitrarily analyze large and complex data sets. Query responses were built to be consistently fast so users could engage with data at the speed of thought. Soon after we developed the core query engine, we also added the ability to ingest both batch and streaming data so users could not only see what was happening in the moment, but also contrast it to years into the past. These core features soon saw Druid deployed for a wide range of use cases such as observability analytics, network performance analytics, fraud operations, digital marketing analytics, clickstream analytics, supply chain analytics, and much more. We still learn about new use cases every day, but what ties all the applications of Druid together is that every use case utilizes analytics-in-motion. End users aren’t just looking at a static dashboard, they are actively engaging with data by asking questions, obtaining responses, and using those responses to ask further questions.

After Imply launched as a company, we’ve been focused on both growing the open source project and community, as well as developing our vision of Imply as an end-to-end solution. Today, we’re the primary organization developing core Druid capabilities, and our contributions have included features such as exactly-once streaming ingestion, a new vectorized query engine, dependency-free batch ingestion, SQL support, table-level security, row/column-level security (only available in Imply), numeric column support, the Druid web console, Kubernetes support, countless integrations, and major rewrites to the storage, query, and ingestion processes. We remain as committed as ever to open source, and will continue to work with the community on making Druid more successful.

We’ve always viewed Druid as a powerful engine, and Imply as the car that fully solves customer pain. When the company was first launched, we created Imply Pivot to surface the best of what Druid can do. Unlike most data visualization tools that focus on statically rendering data through dashboards, Pivot focuses on interactively exploring data through easy point-and-click interactions, the exact thing the underlying engine is best at. In the coming weeks, we’ll officially release Pivot 2.0, which introduces major innovations in its internal query system to enable interactive data exploration experience for even the largest, and most complex data sets.

Around Druid and Pivot, we’ve created a robust deployment and security manager, which allows easy deployment, maintenance, upgrades, and compliance in any environment: bare metal, Kubernetes, or public cloud. Last but not least, the entire package is monitored by Imply Clarity, a fully integrated performance analytics solution.

I couldn’t be more proud of the Imply team and what we’ve accomplished to date. The Series C is a major milestone in our journey, but we’re just getting started. 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.