e6data secures USD $10M to revolutionise data intelligence costs

e6data has announced the completion of a USD $10 million Series A funding round, led by Accel. This funding aims to challenge the prevailing pricing models in the data intelligence sector, which force enterprises to pay substantial amounts for data analysis and storage.

e6data's initiative emerges as enterprises are expected to spend USD $100 billion in 2024 on data intelligence platforms. The company, focusing on offering superior processing efficiencies, claims it can halve the analytics costs and enhance performance by five times. This comes at a crucial period when enterprises, using platforms like Databricks and Snowflake, face increasing operational costs with limited alternatives to the established market leaders.

CEO and co-founder Vishnu Vasanth remarked on the critical role data intelligence platforms play in enterprise operations. "This rapid increase has made data intelligence platforms the second-largest IT spending category – behind only cloud spend for operational systems and application infrastructure. It's fueling the meteoric rise of data warehouse and data lakehouse companies such as Snowflake and Databricks, and the rapid growth of corresponding offerings from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud," Vasanth explained.

The funding round, besides Accel, saw participation from Beenext and other investors. The aim is to offer enterprises better performance and cost management, addressing growing ROI concerns and ecosystem lock-in issues. By providing a more flexible and efficient compute engine for data intelligence, e6data seeks to empower enterprises to exploit their data without the high costs and operational hurdles imposed by existing systems.

e6data's strategy revolves around the innovation of a new compute engine architecture, described as disaggregated, decentralized, dynamic, and Kubernetes-native. "Legitimate ROI concerns stand in the way of enterprises realising the full potential of data & AI. Moreover, organisations cannot freely move lakehouse table formats, data catalogs, compute providers, and cloud providers without adverse price-performance impacts, the need for data movement, and cumbersome application migrations. We aim to address this through our work at e6data," said Vasanth.

The new compute engine is expected to bring significant performance and cost benefits. Extensive experience within the founding team, from companies like Microsoft, ThoughtWorks, IBM DB2, Cisco, and SAP, has contributed to the development of this solution. The team's background has provided them firsthand insights into the challenges enterprises face as they scale their data and AI needs.

Already, e6data has secured several publicly listed Fortune 500 enterprises and high-growth companies as customers. These enterprises are beginning to adopt the platform to manage heavy and compute-intensive workloads efficiently. The new compute engine promises 5x higher performance and more than 50% savings in total cost of ownership, all while being format-neutral and without requiring data movement or application migration.

Vasanth noted that enterprises are constantly overburdened by performance and cost trade-offs, leading to a demand for more efficient solutions. "The total addressable market (TAM) for data and AI solutions is slated to touch USD $230 billion in 2025, with 60% of CXOs expecting to increase their spend over the next year," he said.

Clients such as Chargebee and Freshworks have praised e6data's performance and its potential to innovate. Rajaraman Santhanam, COO of Chargebee, shared, "We are seeing exciting opportunities to innovate for our customers. We have successfully supported concurrencies of over 1,000 QPS on near real-time (NRT) data and complex queries while maintaining client latencies of less than 2 seconds. Other lakehouse engines we evaluated struggled to achieve this level of performance and scalability, despite being more resource intensive."

In agreement, Rajeev Purohit, Head of Platform Engineering at Freshworks, commented on the e6data team's responsiveness and expertise: "We have been impressed with e6data's performance, concurrency, and scalability on some of our heaviest use cases as part of our evaluation and co-creation of a next-generation data platform."

Looking ahead, the rise in analytics use cases and the anticipated higher load on infrastructure suggest e6data is well-positioned to grow. Shekhar Kirani, Partner at Accel, stated, "With GenAI, enterprises are seeing a surge in analytics use cases. Over the next few years, we expect every individual in an organization to be a power data consumer, implying a higher load on analytics and compute infrastructure. We believe e6data is primed to leverage and accelerate this movement."