Data management startup Hydrolix reels in $80M

Data lake provider Hydrolix Inc. today announced that it has raised $80 million in funding to finance growth initiatives.

QED led the investment. It was joined by a dozen other backers, including Akamai Technologies Inc., which resells Hydrolix’s technology to its customers. The round follows a year in which the startup’s revenue grew eightfold.

Portland-based Hydrolix provides a data lake platform that can store both structured and unstructured records. Under the hood, it’s powered by a time-series database. This is a type of database that logs when the records it holds were created, which is important for many analytics use cases. An error log from a factory sensor, for example, is most useful when it displays when the error occurred.

Hydrolix says that its platform can hold upwards of petabytes of data. According to the company, built-in compression algorithms shrink the storage footprint of some records by a factor of 50. That helps reduce enterprises’ infrastructure expenses.

To further lower hardware costs, Hydrolix enables companies to scale storage and compute resources separately. In the past, adding storage capacity to a database required adding more processors even if those processors weren’t needed. Hydrolix removes that requirement, which helps users avoid unnecessary expenses.

A built-in stream processing engine makes it possible to analyze data in near real-time. Hydrolix is promising subsecond response times for many types of queries. When necessary, the platform modifies data before running queries to streamline analysis. Hydrolix can, for example, change the format of a dataset or combine it with information from external sources.

Finding a specific record in a database often requires sifting through a large amount of irrelevant information. According to Hydrolix, its platform skips much of that irrelevant information before running queries to speed up processing. The software does so by generating indexes, which are files that contain shortcuts to important data.

“This round will help extend Hydrolix availability to additional cloud platforms for the biggest security, observability, adtech and RUM platforms,” said Hydrolix co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Marty Kagan. “We’ll also expand the sources of data we ingest while giving customers the power to maintain existing interfaces and processes.”

According to the company, the round’s backers decided to invest “largely due to Hydrolix’s success in building sales momentum” behind its channel program. As part of that program, the software maker provides its technology to Akamai for use in a product called TrafficPeak. The offering helps website operators spot performance and cybersecurity issues.

Besides supporting product development efforts, Hydrolix also expects the funding round to help grow its presence in Asia and Europe. The company disclosed today that it already generates more than 40% of its revenue from international customers.

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