World News – UK – This Israeli startup is aiming for a $ 52 billion cloud data warehouse market and the hottest IPO in 2020

Tel Aviv-based Firebolt announced today that it has raised $ 37 million to develop and sell a new Cloud Data Warehouse experience. Firebolt was founded in early 2018 and had a soft launch three months ago, during which the first cloud data warehouse was presented that delivers interactive analysis in a split second, breaks down terabytes and petabytes of data and uses fewer cloud resources than competing products.

Cloud data warehouses are one of the hottest segments of the market today, and market leader Snowflake went public in September, making it the hottest stock debut yet this year. Two years ago, Snowflake raised about $ 3 in donations. 5 billion. Today it’s worth $ 120 billion, surpassing IBM’s market value.

The current 50-strong Firebolt team believes it can improve the speed and efficiency of data analysis, especially for users of very large databases. When these users try to analyze terabytes and petabytes of data, they wait and wait and wait for the results. « Existing cloud data warehouses do not offer the latency required, » said Eldad Farkash, co-founder and CEO of Firebolt. “They focus on important issues like size and resilience, but a lot of the things we’ve been doing for years haven’t changed. ”

The previous company that Firebolt founders was Sisense, a leading business intelligence startup « Einhorn », was the first iteration of its obsession with the speed and efficiency of data analysis. “Unlike snowflakes, we’re efficient,” says Farkash. “People ask us why you download so little data. That’s because we’re converting the data to our own format. ”

Reordering the data to a new format and structure has been found to be key to speeding up the analysis, especially in terms of the amount of data downloaded when a query is started. This in turn reduces the cost of data analysis and increases the return on investment in cloud resources. This also leads to an interesting competitive positioning in the context of Snowflake’s price innovation. Instead of charging a fixed subscription fee as with other SaaS providers, Snowflake charges its users for the consumption and usage rate of the service. This can be an expensive undertaking when it takes a long time to analyze terabytes of data. In contrast, Firebolt charges a fixed subscription fee.

« The price drop is enormous, » says Farkash. But he insists that “no one is going to cut their budget on snowflakes. In that sense, Firebolt is not necessarily a replacement for Snowflake, but is aimed at high performance users trying to dump all of the terabytes in their « data lake » at a rate that allows them to move past their current time-market challenges.

Developing a new product feature can only take two weeks, says Farkash. However, if you want the new feature to be « data-driven » and provide your clients with « a behind-the-scenes query engine, » this can become an eight month project. Firebolt wants to make this process as short and efficient as possible so that your cloud data resources can seamlessly become a dynamically functioning part of your processes, products and your business.

And data is growing rapidly and migrating to the cloud. According to Gartner, cloud databases will account for 50% of total database sales by 2023. Another research firm estimates the total database market will reach $ 104 billion in 2023. According to IDC, more than 59 zettabytes (59 billion terabytes) of data will be created, captured, copied and consumed worldwide this year. The Covid-19 pandemic is contributing to the data deluge by causing “a sudden increase in the number of home workers working and changing the mix of data that is being created into a larger dataset, video communications and a noticeable increase in consumption of downloaded and streamed videos. ”

For Farkash, his new venture is built on this transformative wave of data driven by companies transitioning from mining data for business insights to better understanding their business to actually doing business with data. ”

I am a managing partner at gPress, a marketing, publishing, research and educational consultancy. Before that, I held senior positions in marketing and research management at

I am a managing partner at gPress, a marketing, publishing, research and educational consultancy. Before that, I held senior positions in marketing and research management at NORC, DEC and EMC. Most recently, I was Senior Director, Thought Leadership Marketing at EMC, where I started the big data conversation called « How Much Information? ». Study (2000 with UC Berkeley) and the Digital Universe Study (2007 with IDC). Twitter: @GilPress

Data Warehouse, Cloud Computing, Snowflake, Big Data, Sisense, Analytics, Business Intelligence