The ability to derive insights and take action from an ever-increasing volume of data has become a critical success factor for organizations across every industry. But as business operations become increasingly digitized and move to the cloud, first-generation analytics systems struggle to deliver insights at the scale and speed necessary to build modern data applications.
The solution is a real-time indexing database that is born in the cloud and delivers analytics at a speed and scale that was previously unheard of. Rockset is a distributed SQL database that can return queries in milliseconds but under the hood, Rockset’s storage architecture is more closely related to a search engine like Google or Facebook newsfeed. Rockset ingests and indexes data in real time and supports SQL queries and joins. Like other cloud native technologies, Rockset’s serverless architecture separates compute and storage allowing developers to dynamically scale up and down as needed.
“The nature of data applications is changing,” says Rockset CEO and co-founder Venkat Venkataramani. “You need speed and scale simultaneously, and you need it to work with very little operational overhead. That’s why we’re not ‘cloud-first’ or ‘cloud-native’, we’re cloud only.”
Today, Rockset is used by organizations across industries including e-commerce, SaaS, finance, construction and supply chain logistics to build applications ranging from personalization and recommendation engines to fraud detection systems. The company just raised a $40 million Series B from Greylock and Sequoia, which follows previous seed and series A investments in Rockset from the two VC firms.
Venkataramani says Rockset’s focus on speed, scale and simplicity stems in part from the core engineering team’s previous experience with web-scale data management and distributed systems at companies including Facebook, Google and Oracle.
In this episode of Greymatter, Venkataramani sat down with Greylock general partner and Rockset board member Jerry Chen to discuss how his team is approaching the new era of cloud-only infrastructure. You can listen to the episode here.
