Sorenson News
We’re very excited to announce our role as the lead investor in Acceldata’s $8.5 million Series A funding round. Acceldata is a Palo Alto, CA-based company with offices in Bangalore, India and Singapore that provides a data observability platform to help enterprises solve common challenges associated with implementing large-scale data initiatives, such as system performance, reliability, and data quality.
With Acceldata’s observability tools, global enterprises, like GE, PhonePe (Walmart), and Michelin, are able to comprehensively monitor complex data applications across technologies in real-time. They can quickly identify and fix issues and ensure that their systems are optimized and able to support the company’s business strategy. In simple terms this means Acceldata equips engineering and infrastructure teams with tools to perform at the same industry-leading levels as engineers from companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. That is super cool.
While the focus on big data operations may not seem as sexy as the AI, ML, and analytics startups that attract the majority of venture investor and media attention of late, we were incredibly excited to meet Rohit Choudhary, co-founder and CEO of Acceldata earlier this year. Sorenson Ventures has long understood from our own experience as big data practitioners and through extensive customer conversations with leading industry executives and technologists that mission-critical, modern data applications simply can’t succeed without strong foundational infrastructure.
Over and over Fortune 2000 executives that architect and oversee large-scale technology platforms have told us that their most pressing issues result from the seemingly mundane world of data engineering, and not the more glorified field of data science. Global companies can struggle with low-quality data, production bottlenecks, scaling costs, and a lack of qualified employees who can build and operate complex, large-scale data systems. Enterprise data executives may worry that their teams are constantly behind the eight-ball. We’ve heard stories of data engineers spending their days–and nights–firefighting operational issues and not focusing on strategic requirements like how to scale systems cost effectively. Platform leaders often see no feasible pathway to stable and reliable systems that meet the expectations of their business peers.
Rohit and his team witnessed the same issues during their time at companies like Hortonworks, 24/7, Zalando, and Inmobi. They repeatedly saw enterprises fail to capitalize on their data investments and recognized that their expertise and experience presented a unique opportunity.
They founded Acceldata in 2018 to improve cross-sectional visibility and transparency across data systems, even when multiple technologies were being used. Acceldata’s tools seek to help data engineers quickly isolate issues, so that companies can confidently experiment, model, and improve their systems as they scale and increase complexity. They also aim to help architects and executives model systems and costs to better understand how they can optimize their systems for future requirements.
Some industry observers will mistake Acceldata as a competitor to the traditional application monitoring and management tools, such as Amazon CloudWatch, Google Operations (formerly StackDriver), DataDog, AppDynamics, and Cloudera Manager. That, however, is not the case. Unlike last-generation tools, Acceldata provides comprehensive data observability for modern enterprise systems, while being agnostic to data and cloud platforms. This is a significantly more complex undertaking than simple monitoring of single-threaded web applications and microservices.
Acceldata’s tools help data engineers predict and identify issues with complex, interconnected, data systems, whether they are on-prem, hybrid, or in the cloud. Acceldata data tools can do this with a speed and specificity that should save time, increase data engineer productivity, and ensure system performance and reliability. What’s more, Acceldata, can help customers cut millions of dollars in costs by supporting open source strategies and eliminating reliance on proprietary commercial tools that are generally insufficient and underpowered for modern, interconnected systems that rely on multiple technologies.
Rohit and his team have made tremendous progress since the company was founded just two short years ago. They have large enterprise customers on multiple continents, project 3X sales in 2020 as compared to 2019, despite a tough economic environment, and consistently receive glowing reviews from companies that have bought their products.
We look forward to a long partnership with Rohit Choudhary and his Acceldata team and are excited to support their development as they establish a brand new market segment for data observability.
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