e6data aims to level the playing field for customers by removing the immense pricing power enjoyed by a handful of vendors due to various new forms of IT ecosystem lock-in at different levels of the data stack.
In today’s digital landscape, businesses are relying on powerful data and AI capabilities to fuel innovation, improve customer experiences, and optimize operations. However, they are poised to spend a staggering $100 billion in 2024 on data intelligence platforms to extract value from their own data. By focusing on this data compute spending challenge, e6 data today announced a $10 million funding round, with the goal of cutting the cost of analyzing their own data in half for companies. The Series A round was led by Accel Partners with participation from Beenext and others.
Data intelligence platforms enable companies to gain insights from their own data to make business decisions and manage workloads such as data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and now generative AI. With the growing volume of data and the need to extract maximum value from it, companies will face a significant cost to use this data. The total addressable market (TAM) for data and AI solutions is expected to reach $230 billion by 2025, and 60% of executives plan to increase their spending over the next year.
Vishnu Vasanth, Co-Founder and CEO, commented: “This rapid growth has made data intelligence platforms the second-largest IT spending category, behind cloud spending for operational systems and application infrastructure. It is fueling the meteoric rise of data warehouse and data lakehouse companies such as Snowflake and Databricks, as well as the rapid growth of corresponding offerings from AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.”
However, as spending increases, ROI concerns are reaching a critical point. Enterprise technology leaders need a way to simultaneously increase performance and access new capabilities, while controlling costs. They increasingly see that there are no compelling alternatives to the status quo and are wary of new forms of ecosystem lock-in. “Legitimate ROI concerns are preventing businesses from realizing the full potential of data and AI. Additionally, organizations cannot freely move lakehouse table formats, data catalogs, compute providers, and cloud providers without negatively impacting price and performance, without the need to move data, and without time-consuming application migrations. We aim to address this through our work at e6data,” added Vishnu Vasanth.
To address these challenges, e6data has developed a new generation of “compute engine” for data intelligence platforms that help enterprises amplify the ROI of their existing platforms and architectures and escape ecosystem lock-in; all with zero friction to adoption in the form of zero data movement, zero application migration, and zero downtime.
e6data plans to expand access to its Lighthouse Customer Program, which offers the e6data solution as a managed service for enterprise customers’ most demanding or urgent use cases, with production support and professional services.
Data intelligence platforms such as data lakehouses and data warehouses are the foundation of all analytics and AI. They essentially use distributed “compute engines,” whether open source or vendor-backed, for every form of processing, from ingestion to transformation, dashboards, reporting, ML model training and inference, and RAG-based generative AI applications.
However, existing compute engines rely on monolithic architectures with centralized components for most aspects of the query or job lifecycle. This creates challenges in terms of cost, performance, concurrency management, and availability, especially on the heavy, compute-intensive workloads that enterprises increasingly face when operating at production scale.
The e6data founding team saw an opportunity to fill these gaps with a new engine architecture and a Kubernetes-native, decentralized, disaggregated distributed computing model. The e6data engine outperforms leading commercial and open source solutions on real-world heavy workloads and popular benchmarks: 5x better performance, 50%+ total cost of ownership (TCO) savings, and a truly form-neutral approach that eliminates ecosystem lock-in.
With a multidisciplinary mix of distributed systems engineers, database creators, open source contributors, and go-to-market leaders from Microsoft, ThoughtWorks, IBM DB2, Cisco, SAP, and Thoughtworks, the e6data team’s prior experiences in over 100 large-scale data intelligence platforms have given them a first-hand view of the evolving technology landscape and the challenges businesses face as they evolve their data and AI needs.
e6data already counts Fortune 500 publicly traded companies and high-growth companies among its customers. The company anticipates explosive growth due to the increasing demand for heavy, compute-intensive workloads for high-volume data products (e.g., customer and sales-facing dashboards, reporting), advanced analytics on near-real-time data (e.g., personalization, fraud/risk, inventory planning), and production-grade generative AI applications (e.g., RAG for search, recommendation, customer support).
Data platform spending is already the two largest expenses for CXOs. However, the largest and fastest-growing expenses are typically related to non-discretionary, strategically important workloads.
According to GartnerOver 80% of enterprises will have Gen 2 AI in production by 2026, further fueling the need for e6data’s high-efficiency, format-neutral compute infrastructure offering.
Rajaraman Santhanam, COO of Chargebee, added, “We have worked with e6data on several internal and external analytics use cases, all built on Chargebee’s versatile and scalable data lakehouse platform. We see exciting opportunities for innovation for our customers. We have successfully supported concurrency of over 1,000 QPS on near real-time (NRT) data and complex queries while maintaining client latencies below 2 seconds. Other lakehouse engines we have evaluated have struggled to achieve this level of performance and scalability, despite being more resource intensive.”
With its unique offering, e6data hopes to level the playing field for customers by removing the immense pricing power that a handful of vendors have due to various new forms of IT ecosystem lock-in at different levels of the data stack. Organizations cannot freely move Lakehouse table formats, data catalogs, compute providers, and cloud providers without negatively impacting pricing and performance, without the need to move data, and without time-consuming application migrations.
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