ReveFi Raises $20M to Launch AI-Powered Data Engineering Platform

Data observability startup Revefi raises $20M to fuel new 'AI data engineer' product

Seattle startup Revefi raised $20 million in a Series A round to support growth of its software platform that helps companies get a handle on data-related costs, usage and performance. The company said it will use the fresh cash to help roll out a new product called Raden, which it describes as an "AI data engineer." It uses generative AI and automation to help customers maximize ROI from data warehouse tools such as Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks, and others. "Revefi's vision for an AI data engineer to augment and enhance data teams is exactly the kind of disruptive innovation that creates significant value for the enterprise," Icon Ventures General Partner Preeti Rathi said in a statement. "Early customers we spoke with were incredibly excited about the product." Icon Ventures led the Series A round. Other backers include Mayfield (which led the previous round), GTM Capital, and StepStone Group. Total funding to date is $29 million. The 30-person company did not disclose specific financial metrics but said revenue is growing "at a rate of 800%." Revefi is led by CEO and co-founder Sanjay Agrawal, who was previously co-founder and head of the Seattle office for AI analytics company ThoughtSpot. He also held software engineering roles at Microsoft and Google. Shashank Gupta, co-founder and CTO, is a former senior staff software engineer of data infrastructure at Facebook. He was co-founder and head of engineering at ThoughtSpot.

Revefi raises $20M to launch world's first 'AI data engineer' - SiliconANGLE

Data observability startup Revefi Inc. said today it has closed on $20 million in an early-stage funding round, timing the announcement with the launch of what it says is the world's first-ever "AI data engineer." Today's Series A round was led by Icon Ventures and saw participation from a host of other backers, including Mayfield, GTM Capital and StepStone Group, bringing the startup's total amount raised to $30 million. Revefi said its artificial intelligence-powered data engineer, called Raden, acts as a kind of autopilot for data teams, helping them to drive better business results and save money on the costs associated with their data lakes and data warehouses. It's really a kind of data observability tool, designed to provide reliable and timely insights into issues such as the accuracy and quality of their data, and ensure that the right data is being fed into the right business applications. The other benefit of Raden is that it helps companies to keep a lid on their data spending. According to Revefi, the AI data engineer can help customers reduce their data warehousing costs by up to 50%, while increasing their operational efficiency by around 35%. The company's co-founders appear well-qualified to make good on those promises. Chief Executive Officer Sanjay Agrawal previously designed and developed a self-managing distributed data warehouse at ThoughtSpot Inc. that was purpose-built for interactive and ad hoc data analytics. Before that, he spent over a decade at Google LLC and Microsoft Corp. working on their database offerings. Meanwhile, Revefi's chief technology officer is Shashank Gupta, who previously worked for Meta Platforms Inc., where he helped to build a system that automates data quality for its cloud data warehouse. He also worked at ThoughtSpot, where he led that company's data engineering team. Preeti Rathi, general partner at Icon Ventures, said the co-founders' background in high-performance databases and data quality tools is impressive and one of the main things that convinced him to back their company. "Their vision for an AI data engineer that augments and enhances data teams is exactly the kind of disruptive innovation that creates significant value for enterprises," he added. Revefi said the funds from today's round will be used to support the launch of Raden and expand its product and customer success operations teams.

Revefi seeks to automate companies' data operations | TechCrunch

Sanjay Agrawal and Shashank Gupta, who helped co-found the business intelligence company ThoughtSpot, say that several years ago, they observed that organizations were struggling to deal with the increasing amount of data under their purview. Even enterprises with robust data analytics and orchestration tools seemed to be having a rough go of it, Agrawal and Gupta say. Maybe so. According to a Deloitte study, 67% of managers aren't comfortable accessing insights from data analytics platforms, partly due to tech-related challenges. "Everyone wants to be strategic, but current approaches keep companies trapped in firefighting mode, grappling with routine, preventable operational and tactical tasks," Agrawal told TechCrunch. "Companies need a modern approach to address their expanding roles and drive business success." And, wouldn't you know, Agrawal and Gupta say they've developed exactly this "modern approach" and built it into Revefi, a software-as-a-service platform (and startup of the same name) they co-launched in 2021. Revefi connects to a company's data stores and databases (e.g. Snowflake, Databricks and so on) and attempts to automatically detect and troubleshoot data-related issues, as well as makes suggestions as to how these various resources might be optimized. "Revefi enables data teams to be more strategic," Agrawal said, "and deliver the right data at the right time at the right cost to businesses." Agrawal and Gupta assert that Revefi can help accomplish things like delivering a unified view of a company's data operations and decreasing storage bills by performing an analysis of cost and quality across different providers. One customer was able to reduce their cloud data platform costs by 30% using Revefi, Agrawal claims. "We have replaced and won against Monte Carlo, Acceldata, Anomalo, Informatica and other data observability and data quality products," Agrawal said. Bold claims! Asked how just many clients Revefi has at present, Agrawal declined to say. But he did reveal that several "large enterprises" are paying for Revefi's services, including a "$5 billion public security company" and "$10 billion public data company." (Perhaps revealingly, Revefi lists ThoughtSpot in the case studies section of its website.) Seattle-based Revefi, which this week closed a $20 million Series A funding round led by Icon Ventures with participation from Mayfield, GTM Capital and StepStone Group, plans to greatly expand its product and 30-person team in the coming year. To date, the startup has raised $29 million. "Enterprises are struggling with the explosive growth in and variety of data, the proliferation of data tools and complexity and out-of-control data spending," Agrawal said. "We're benefitting from this; we are in a high-growth phase and are hiring AI, engineering, sales and marketing talent. We are agile, manage our costs efficiently and have a pragmatic approach to growth."