Why we invested in BlazingDB
I first met BlazingDB founder and CEO Rodrigo Aramburu almost a year ago. We got along well, but at the time he was based in Texas and I was only looking at local companies to invest in. When he moved to the Bay Area earlier this year, I took another look at his pitch deck and did a bunch of diligence before ultimately deciding to make an investment in his company.
While I was impressed by what Rodrigo, his brother Felipe, and their co-founder William Malpica had built, it was BlazingDB’s differentiated technology that convinced us to invest.
For those unfamiliar, BlazingDB has created a SQL engine that is cloud-friendly and takes advantage of the unique characteristics of GPUs to provide scalable, performant, and distributed data warehouse solutions.
Anyone who has worked with very large data warehouses knows that they tend to slow down as they scale up. By writing a SQL engine that runs on cloud-based GPUs, BlazingDB has superior speed, scalability, and cost efficiency for large data warehouses applications.
BlazingDB customers can experience orders of magnitude of improvement in performance. Furthermore, their ability to turn on GPU resources “on-demand” to access an existing data lake allows for ease of deployment, reduced cost, and increased flexibility.
We spent a lot of time talking to partners, potential customers, and surveying the competitive landscape... and we believe BlazingDB has a compelling and cost-effective solution for anyone with a large data warehouse they need to manage.
As a result, we led the company’s seed round announced today. But we’re not just providing capital to BlazingDB as part of this round. Over the last several months, Rodrigo has been working in the Samsung NEXT office in San Francisco, where we’ve also been providing mentorship to the founding team.
And of course, we’re happy to have global GPU leader NVIDIA as our co-investor on this deal. Their expertise will be invaluable as BlazingDB grows this nascent market.
Congratulations to Rodrigo, Felipe, William, and the rest of the BlazingDB team on raising $2.9 million to enter the next stage of their company’s evolution.