Our Series A in e6data: Disrupting the Data Intelligence Compute Market with Unmatched Performance and Cost Efficiency

We are thrilled to announce our Series A investment in e6data, a company on a mission to transform the data intelligence compute landscape by eliminating compute ecosystem lock-in and offering a superior price-performance alternative to existing engines.

Over the past decade, we've witnessed a seismic shift in the data layer, driven by the relentless pace of digitization and the exponential growth in both structured and unstructured data. Every aspect of modern business is creating what we call “data exhaust” — massive volumes of information that flow from day-to-day operations, user interactions, and systems. This surge has given rise to new insights and opportunities for businesses, but it has also introduced significant challenges, especially in terms of compute costs.

Looking to the future, the big challenge is not storage; storage costs are well-controlled and scalable. The real pressure is on compute. As data volumes and the complexity of queries continue to grow, compute costs are compounding rapidly. Without a major technological breakthrough, compute costs could spiral out of control over the next decade, making the current trajectory unsustainable for businesses. This is where the need for advanced compute engines becomes critical.

Enter e6data.

While the advent of data warehouses like Snowflake and Redshift significantly accelerated time-to-insight for companies, it quickly became apparent that this came with the debilitating downside of vendor lock-in and skyrocketing compute costs. To put things into perspective, the average Fortune 500 company racks up tens of millions of dollars in compute spend for data intelligence alone!

Open architectures like the Lakehouse model promised to give enterprises more control over their data, and select from a range of modular compute offerings. However, companies still found themselves grappling with large and rapidly growing compute costs. Furthermore, the inability of these systems to support near real-time applications, high concurrency workloads, and offer deterministic latency guarantees meant companies had to resort to piping their data to the same closed systems they tried to escape.

When we first met e6data’s co-founders, Vishnu, Adishesh, and Srinath, they made what we thought was a bold claim. They said that their solution could power both data-heavy and time-sensitive near real-time queries without the need for data to leave their customer’s lakehouse—while also being significantly cheaper than existing offerings. Once we spoke with their early design partners, we realized they weren’t exaggerating. e6data was, in fact, able to demonstrate a 50% - 70% reduction in overall costs and a 5-10x speed-up in query times.

e6data offers a Kubernetes-native compute engine that enhances ROI and halves the total cost of ownership. Crucially, their disaggregated and decentralized architecture ensures interoperability with all major Lakehouse formats, catalogs, cloud providers, and even major SQL dialects. These core propositions and a zero-friction adoption experience have helped e6data gain traction with Fortune 500 enterprises and fast-growing tech companies.

With GenAI amplifying the already explosive demand for BI, reporting, and real-time data products, we believe e6data is primed to lead the next wave of innovation in data infrastructure. The company's ability to reduce costs and improve performance for its customers, alongside its unique position in negating vendor lock-in, positions it strongly for the future. We look forward to being a part of this journey.