SQL Database Company Materialize Reels In $40 Million

NEW YORK — Materialize, a  streaming SQL database company, has raised $40 million in funding that will be used to grow its engineering team, prepare the business for growth and extend product rollout.

Kleiner Perkins led a $32 million Series B round. Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated in the B round after Ravi Mhatre led the Series A investment in 2019. Additional investors include executives from Cockroach Labs, Datadog and Rubrik.

According to Gartner, by 2022, most major new business systems will use streaming data to improve decision making. Whether it’s delivering personalized experiences, accurately identifying fraud, building predictive AI, or discovering new business opportunities, the ability to run complex queries on multiple streams of data is critical to making better decisions. Materialize makes it simple for any business to use streaming data while accelerating time to value.

“A company’s ability to use real-time data for insights and value will determine which companies lead their respective industries in the years ahead,” said Arjun Narayan, co-founder and CEO of Materialize. “When the world changes quickly, you need a way to interpret the chaos and make the right decisions quickly. Our mission is to make real-time information simple and accessible so businesses can easily identify what’s important.”

In an industry where ‘real-time’ has become a vague marketing claim, Materialize provides businesses with millisecond response times, accelerating time-to-value and enabling decision makers to confidently predict results instantaneously. Any developer or analyst who uses Materialize can easily understand streaming data, answer complex questions and build intelligent applications using standard technology.

Materialize is the first standard SQL interface for streaming data available to engineers looking to build complex queries and multiway joins without specialized skills or microservices. Unlike other streaming data platforms that claim to be real-time, Materialize computes and incrementally maintains data as it is generated so query results are accessible the moment they are needed. This approach provides businesses with correct answers in milliseconds – without interference from late-arriving data.

“Every business is going to be a real-time business within the next few years, but current approaches require compromises between cost, speed and skills to get there,” said Bucky Moore, partner at Kleiner Perkins. “The Materialize team has been studying this problem for a decade and has built a unique approach that puts them in a strong position to fulfill the massive potential of streaming data without requiring compromises by engineering teams.”

Founded in 2019 in New York City, the Materialize team includes engineers who were early employees of Cockroach Labs, Datadog, Dropbox, Pure Storage and YouTube. Frank McSherry, co-founder and chief scientist of Materialize, was previously at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley where he co-invented Differential Privacy, and led the Naiad project. Frank created Timely Dataflow and Differential Dataflow, which serve as the basis of Materialize. He has won numerous awards for advanced distributed computing and data privacy.