Imply Closes $70 Million Series C at $700M Valuation to Extend Leadership as Foundational Platform for Analytics-in-Motion

Significant customer momentum underscores movement away from expensive, slow and static analytics solutions towards highly-scalable, cost-effective, and interactive analytics solutions

BURLINGAME,
CA – Media OutReach – 17
June 2021 – Imply,
the pioneer of Analytics-in-Motion, and founded by the original creators of
Apache Druid, today announced the closing of a $70 million Series C led by
Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Tiger Global Management,
bringing total funding to over $116 million. Existing investors A16Z, Khosla
Ventures and Geodesic Capital also participated in this round. This additional
funding follows a banner year for Imply, growing market adoption of both Imply
and open source Apache Druid.  Imply has
now surpassed 100 enterprise and digital-native customers, using Imply as the
engine for analytics-powered applications that they build, and/or as a complete
solution to directly solve internal BI and operational analytics use cases. The
additional funding will extend Imply’s market leadership in the rapidly growing
area of Analytics-in-Motion. 

“The world of analytics is being upended, as
it is now a competitive disadvantage to wait hours or days to iterate on
insights, to make decisions based on stale data, or to leverage solutions that
either crumble or cost a fortune at scale,” said Elliott Robinson, Partner at
Bessemer Venture Partners.  “Every day,
more and more established enterprises and digital natives realize the power of
Analytics-in-Motion, and Imply is far ahead in this race to redefine analytics
across the enterprise, with numerous marquee customers and demonstrated
customer success worldwide.”

Analytics-in-Motion is the new requirement for
digital transformation, and has emerged due to the demands of modern business
and the limitations of existing analytics solutions to meet these demands.
Imply’s unique technology removes the handcuffs to effective analytics by
delivering all four attributes organizations require for effective analytics:

1. Interactive queries:
   questions do not need to be predetermined and organizations get an engine
   and an app/UI, not only a database; queries can be created on-the-fly,
   answers are provided immediately, and insights are generated at the speed
   of thought (sub-second OLAP queries, self-service data analytics,
   point-and-explore integrated UI)
2. Unlimited scale:
   purpose-built to scale (high query concurrency, PB+ data volumes, high
   ingestion throughput)
3. Real-time and historical data loads: insights can be derived from data in motion and the present can
   be compared to the past (Kafka/Kinesis
   integrations, data lake integrations, flexible and adaptive schemas)
4. Best price/performance:
   built to scale with maximum cost efficiency (configurable
   price/performance, predictable performance and costs, fine-tune based on
   usage)

The combination of these four requirements
enables a broad set of new customer outcomes and will place analytics-in-motion
as a defining characteristic of how every successful organization operates.

New
Customer Outcomes Driven by Analytics-in-Motion

Leading organizations leverage
analytics-in-motion as: (1) the analytics engine behind analytics-powered
applications centered around security, operational and business insights; and
(2) a complete solution to solve internal BI and operational analytics use
cases. 

Analytics engine for analytics-powered applications

Designed for developers and product managers

• Network endpoint analytics in motion: “Companies that rely on the
  Internet for their business depend on ThousandEyes’ leading Cloud and Internet
  Intelligence platform to ensure seamless digital experiences for their
  customers and employees,” said Murtaza Doctor, Head of Engineering &
  Operations at Cisco ThousandEyes. “To build our
  industry-leading solutions, we leverage the most advanced technologies,
  including Imply and Druid, which provides an interactive, highly scalable, and
  real-time analytics engine, helping us create differentiated offerings.”
• Fraud detection in motion: “As the
  leader in Digital Trust & Safety, Sift leverages advanced machine learning
  to ensure our customers can accurately detect and prevent fraud,” said Neeraj
  Gupta, SVP, Engineering & Cloud Operations at Sift. “Imply and Druid offer
  a unique set of benefits to Sift as the analytics engine behind Watchtower, our
  automated monitoring tool. Imply provides us with real-time data ingestion, the
  ability to aggregate data by a variety of dimensions from thousands of servers,
  and the capacity to query across a moving time window with on-demand analysis
  and visualization.”
• Gaming analytics in motion: “As a leading provider of analytics in the mobile
  gaming space, a key aspect of our competitive differentiation is the depth of
  reporting we provide to our customers. To accelerate our customers’ success, we
  wanted to build a customer-facing analytics application that combined the
  performance of pre-computed queries with the ability to issue arbitrary ad-hoc
  queries without restrictions,” said Ioana Hreninciuc, CEO of
  GameAnalytics. “We selected Imply and Druid as the engine for our analytics
  application, as they are built from the ground up for interactive analytics at
  scale. In addition, for our internal analytics, Imply Pivot has become the tool
  of choice for our support and product teams to explore all of our data in a
  flexible way.”
• Product Usage Analytics in motion: “Strivr’s Immersive Learning
  platform is revolutionizing hiring and training through Virtual Reality (VR),”
  said Aneesh Kulkarni, VP of Engineering at Strivr. “Analytics is critical
  to our platform as it provides customers with a unique level of data-driven insights
  from immersive training experiences. We chose Imply and Druid as our analytics
  database due to its scalable and cost-effective analytics capabilities, as well
  as its flexibility to analyze data across multiple dimensions. It is key to
  powering the analytics engine behind our interactive, customer-facing
  dashboards surfacing insights derived over telemetry data from immersive
  experiences.”

Complete solution for internal analytics use cases

Designed for anyone needing to understand data

• Observability Analytics in motion: “Plaid’s mission is to
  unlock financial freedom,” said Gordon Worley, Sr. Staff Software Engineer
  at Plaid. “To do that, we’ve built a world-class observability platform
  that allows our customers to offer the best fintech experiences to their users.
  Four things are crucial for observability analytics; interactive queries,
  scale, real-time ingest, and price/performance. That is why we chose Imply and
  Druid.”
• Advertising Analytics in motion: “Ippen Digital is a
  pioneer in helping publishers transition to new sources of digital revenue, and
  analytics is central for us to deliver sophisticated use of audience data and
  deliver content recommendations,” said Jan Ippen, CEO of Ippen
  Digital.  “Using Imply and Druid, we
  are able to aggregate and analyze all information, details and dimensions of
  advertising data from our upstream providers. 
  We can now perform real-time exploratory analytics on advertiser
  behavior, which enables us to build a differentiated offering to our
  customers.  Imply and Druid are core to
  our success as a digital advertising platform.”

“In the modern world, what worked yesterday
often doesn’t work today. 
Analytics-in-Motion will power the next frontier of digital
transformation — the movement away from analytics solutions that are
expensive, slow, and static, and towards analytics solutions that are highly
scalable, cost effective, and enable customers to quickly get to the ‘a-ha’
moment,” said Fangjin Yang, CEO of Imply. “Bessemer Venture Partners shares
our vision to re-define how organizations gain value from analytics, and we are
thrilled to welcome them as our newest investor and to welcome Elliott Robinson
to our Board of Directors.  We are also
thrilled to welcome two new executives to Imply in the wake of our
Series C funding: our CMO, Praveen Rangnath (most recently at Confluent) and VP
of Customer Success, Kevin Hodgkins (most recently at Fivetran).”

Additional
resources

• Read more about this announcement
  from Fangjin Yang on the Imply blog
• Read more about our vision
  for Analytics-in-Motion
• Join Imply and be a part of redefining the
  massive market for analytics
• See how Imply customers
  are leveraging Analytics-in-Motion