Earlier today we issued a press release announcing the completion of our Series C fundraise. For startups, fundraises are typically meaningful events; this one will always be special due to the global situation that surrounds us. It is a reminder that great companies have the opportunity to continue to be great, even through adverse times. And also a reminder that those times will end.
At Dremio, we feel a heightened sense of urgency. Urgency for our customers, which means urgency for us to continue delivering an amazing product. The current pandemic acutely shows the power of data. When you have it, you can make clear, informed decisions. When you don’t, you are guessing on top of guessing. In business, data is exploding, and data lake storage (S3, ADLS, HDFS, etc.) has emerged in recent years as the system of record in the enterprise. Dremio’s vision is to help our customers make clear, informed business decisions with that data, by giving them fast, efficient, secure and direct access to it.
That mission is what gives us confidence, even during these volatile financial times. Coming off a strong year of 3.5x ARR growth, it was clear that customers are finding tremendous value in our product. Building on that momentum, we added the perfect growth investor to our team with Teddie Wardi, partner at Insight. Teddi brings passion and experience to our board of directors along with Insight’s resources for building great companies. He will augment our world-class board of directors including Barry Eggers (Lightspeed), Tomasz Tunguz (Redpoint), and Rama Sekhar (Norwest).
While the need for data analytics is not going away, times like these cause everyone in business to scrutinize their investments, creating the paradox of saving money now while strategically investing in the future. For data analytics, that means scrutinizing architectures. What is the best way to deliver key insights to the business? Does it fit with your long-term cloud strategy? Does it handle your on-premises environment until you get there? Does it allow your business to move as quickly as it needs with a rapidly growing data lake? Does it provide proper security and governance? And does it drive infrastructure efficiency to lower your cost per query?
Dremio was built to answer those questions in the modern world of cloud data lake storage and significant investments in on-premises data lakes that have not been realized. Moreover, it is built to help you with a variety of data sources that often augment the data lake with key pieces of operational data. And it is built to do this in a way that simplifies your architecture and eliminates data movement and copying.
Data is an integral part of every business today, and in today’s market cost-efficient approaches to data analytics are no longer “nice to have” but essential. That is why our investors wanted to back us now, and why we feel the urgency to help customers get through this time and come out stronger on the other side.