Our Investment in Rockset

Finding the shortest path from data to applications

The ascent of mobile and cloud computing has created an explosion of data types and data sources. We can now track real time data from our cars, phones, toasters, and combine that with customer information and transaction data. Unfortunately, even with all the open source tools and cloud services that are available, it has gotten more complex and more expensive to build useful data-driven applications. Today’s applications need real-time data processing, cloud storage, and the the familiarity of SQL support even on semi-structured data. As a result, developers spend most of their time stitching together data pipelines and use glue code to build these apps.

Luckily, the lives of developers, data scientists, and data engineers just a got a lot easier.

Rockset is launching the industry’s first serverless search and analytics engine to help developers and data scientists build data-driven applications as simply as possible.

I first met Venkat exactly three years ago when he left Facebook and was exploring ideas for his next adventure. One of the conversations we had together centered around his learnings from building the Facebook data team and how he believed all developers needed simpler tools to build better applications. Venkat soon teamed up with his co-founder Dhruba, and turned their vision into Rockset.

We have been with Rockset since the very beginning — I joined the company’s board when Greylock did the seed round back in 2016 and then Rockset worked out of our San Francisco offices for the next six months while our talent team helped the founders recruit many of the early engineers.

Today, I am excited to announce our continuing support of the company’s vision with the Series A along with our friends at Sequoia Capital.

Too Many Tools, A Lot of Data Sources

Building an application that leverages several different data sources and data types is a challenge for any organization. No single database, SQL or NoSQL, operational or analytical, can do the job alone. As a result data engineers are forced to cobble together a combination of databases and data services resulting in costs, errors, and complexity.

A Simpler, Faster Way to Build Data-Driven Apps

Rockset has built a completely new serverless search and analytics engine, making it easy to go from data to applications. Developers can do less data and performance engineering, and focus on querying the data and iterating quickly.

• Raw Data: Operate directly on raw data, including JSON, XML, CSV, and Parquet. Plug data from real-time streams, data lakes, databases, and data warehouses into Rockset.
• Ingest: Ingest real-time data without building pipelines. Rockset continuously syncs new data as it lands in your data sources without the need for a fixed schema.
• Query: Use familiar SQL, including joins, filters, and aggregations. Rockset automatically indexes all fields in your data.
• Build: Create scalable apps, microservices, live dashboards, and data science notebooks using REST APIs, Python, Java, Javascript, and Go.

Simply put — Rockset makes developing data-driven apps easy.

The A-Team

Co-founders Venkat and Dhruba understand pain points facing developers and the challenges of data-driven software development. They are engineers by trade with deep technical knowledge from building databases at Oracle, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google. At Facebook, Venkat was responsible for all online data services that stored and served user data including SQL databases, graph databases, key value stores and log processing system. Dhruba was the founding engineer of the RocksDB datastore and founding engineer of Hadoop Distributed File System at Yahoo.

Rockset has assembled one of the best product and engineering teams that I have ever worked with in the cloud and data space. There’s no other team who understands cloud scale data and distributed systems and is better equipped to tackle this problem than Rockset.

I am excited to have partnered with Rockset from the very beginning to create the shortest path from data to apps. Hear more from the team here or reach out to them directly!