Imply Raises $100M Series D to Make Developers the Heroes of Analytics

Imply, the company behind the open source analytics database called Apache Druid, announced a $100 million Series D round today, bringing its total valuation to $1.1 billion.

“What started as three friends working around a desk in a tiny San Francisco apartment has become a unicorn,” said Imply Co-Founder and CEO Fangjin “FJ” Yang in a celebratory blog post.

Imply and Apache Druid, a real-time analytics database, seem well-positioned in the hot streaming analytics market. Companies are looking to developers for modern analytics applications that can keep up with high volumes of streaming data to provide real-time business insights to users of all technical skill levels. The company says this new funding round will enable it to help developers become the new heroes of analytics.

“In its early days, Druid was adopted for a set of use cases in a handful of industries. Today, developers have shown its applicability across all industries—and the use cases have expanded exponentially,” stated Yang. “It’s humbling to see how Apache Druid and Imply have been so instrumental in helping our customers create competitive advantages.”

This Series D round comes after the March launch of Imply Polaris, a fully managed DBaaS built from Druid that is part of the company’s Project Shapeshift, a year-long initiative to reimagine Druid for a cloud-based world. Imply also launched a multi-stage query engine that the company says makes Druid “the only database to support advanced reports and complex alerts alongside interactive, real-time analytics.”

Yang mentions in his blog post that Imply’s goal is to continue expanding Druid’s capabilities and to rebuild it with an updated framework that incorporates the new multi-stage query engine. He hopes to enable new abilities including SQL-based data ingestion, SQL-based batch and streaming data transformation (built-in ETL), multi-stage queries, and optional separation of compute and storage. Yang says the company has been testing these new capabilities with partnering organizations for a few months now, and that a new major release will be coming down the pipeline in the near future.

“I’m very excited that the first major release will be coming in the next few months, where we will be open sourcing the first phase of our work,” said Yang. “At Imply, we believe developers are the new heroes of analytics but they’re so much more. They’re heroes of their respective organizations. With that in mind, our major product initiatives are all designed to make evaluating, operating, and deploying Druid increasingly easier, while providing more tools for developers to build analytic applications their companies need to be successful.”

Today’s Series D round was led by the private equity firm Thoma Bravo with participation from OMERS Growth Equity, both of which are new investors. Bessemer Venture Funds, Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures also participated in the financing as existing investors.

Imply customers and Druid users seem to be happy with the news of expansion for a product they rely on: “Our platform enables enterprise teams to successfully deploy AI models and avoid AI failures by analyzing massive amounts of data telemetry to detect anomalies and performance regressions in real time. That’s why we chose Apache Druid and Imply to power our dynamic query engine. We combine both stream and batch processing, empowering our customers to interactively explore limitless amounts of statistical data profiles, metrics and anomalies across their data and machine learning pipelines,” said Andy Dang, co-founder and head of engineering at AI observability company WhyLabs.

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