Cloud startup StreamSets lands $35 million in Series C funding to accelerate its international go-to-market and R&D efforts

StreamSets, provider of the industry’s first DataOps platform for modern data integration, has raised $35 million in a Series C funding to accelerate its international go-to-market, R&D efforts, and customer-facing functions. The latest funding round was led by Harmony Partners with participation from new investor Tenaya Capital, and existing investors Battery Ventures and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). This round brings the firm’s total funding to over $65 million. StreamSets is backed by top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firms, including Battery Ventures, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), and Accel Partners.

Founded in 2014 by Girish Pancha, former chief product officer of Informatica, and Arvind Prabhakar, a former engineering leader at Informatica and Cloudera, StreamSets built the industry’s first multi-cloud DataOps platform for modern data integration, helping enterprises to continuously flow big, streaming and traditional data to their data scientists and data-intensive applications. It uniquely handles data drift, those frequent and unexpected changes to data that break pipelines and damage data integrity. The platform combines the open source StreamSets Data Collector for execution of any-to-any pipelines (the data plane) with a cloud-native StreamSets Control Hub™ for the design, monitoring and performance management of multi-pipeline topologies (the control plane).

The investment underscores the growing importance of DataOps, the emerging practice of applying DevOps principles to data management and data integration. DataOps has grown in importance as companies re-architect their “data supply chain” with microservices; leverage new data sources like IoT devices, API feeds and systems logs; and adopt an array of modern data platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Apache Kafka, Apache Hadoop/Spark, and NoSQL.

StreamSets DataOps Platform lets enterprises build, integrate, deploy and operate dataflow architectures for big data and streaming applications — all as a continuous, disciplined process. They often realize order-of-magnitude cost savings and greatly accelerate the delivery of data serving key initiatives such as customer 360, cybersecurity and IoT. The platform’s unique ability to inspect and act on data as it flows (“Intelligent Pipelines”) means it can automatically address data drift to avoid pipeline breakdowns, detect and protect sensitive data in-stream, and enforce Data SLA guarantees — things that are not possible using traditional data integration solutions.

“We’re seeing enterprise data architectures grow in complexity while use of big and fast data becomes business-critical, driving market insights, product innovation and operational excellence,” said Mark Lotke, founder and managing partner, Harmony Partners. “Harmony is purpose-built to find and support bold tech entrepreneurs who are revolutionizing their industries, having invested in firms such as Alation, InfluxDB and Qubole. StreamSets fundamentally changes the $10 billion data integration market, helping companies cost-effectively squeeze maximum value out of their big data and streaming data assets.”

This latest funding round comes on the heels of excellent market traction and financial performance. In the previous four fiscal quarters, the company doubled its commercial customer count and tripled its revenues. StreamSets Data Collector™, the open source core of StreamSets platform launched three years ago, has been downloaded well over 2 million times by thousands of companies, including over one-third of the Fortune 500. Commercial customers include leading firms such as GSK, Chesapeake Energy and Solera Holdings, plus state and government agencies in multiple countries. Over two-thirds of StreamSets commercial customers subscribe to one or more of its proprietary software offerings.

“The disruptive trends of cloud data platforms, self-service analytics and open source software allow enterprises to unleash the power of big and fast data to all business units and processes,” said Girish Pancha, CEO and co-founder, StreamSets. “Companies and government entities use the StreamSets DataOps Platform to operationalize the continuous delivery of the right data to the right people, even as data sources, platforms and user requirements constantly change. Built for modern enterprise architectures, StreamSets technology does away with the rigidity and opaqueness of traditional data integration software.”

“Battery has had a long-standing thesis that data and AI are the key enablers of digital transformation across many industries,” said Dharmesh Thakker, a Battery Ventures general partner and StreamSets board member. “We have enjoyed our partnership with StreamSets from the company’s early days, as they have become a new data integration standard in a cloud- and AI-first world. We are excited to partner with Harmony, Tenaya and NEA to drive the next stage of the company’s growth.”