Burlingame, California’s Imply has secured $100 million USD to expand the reach of its real-time data analytics platform.
The Canadian-led, United States-based startup, which was founded by the original creators of the open-source Apache Druid project, offers a database designed to help developers build data analytics applications.
Imply co-founder and CEO Fangjin “FJ” Yang—a Canadian and two-time University of Waterloo graduate now based in San Francisco—said that the number of use cases for the company’s analytics database offering has “expanded exponentially.”
This expansion is part of what attracted PE firm Thoma Bravo, which led Imply’s Series D financing, and fellow new investor OMERS Growth Equity.
Warda Shaheen, OMERS Growth Equity director and co-head of software, told BetaKit that Imply is facing down “a multi-billion dollar opportunity in the early innings of adoption.”
“We are excited about the company’s massive [total addressable market], strong product, and exceptional management team,” Shaheen added.
The all-equity Series D round also saw participation from existing Imply investors Bessemer Venture Funds, Andreessen Horowitz, and Khosla Ventures. In response to questions from BetaKit, Imply did not confirm whether the round involved any secondary capital. If all primary, the round brings Imply’s total funding to $215 million and gives the company a valuation of $1.1 billion.
Imply’s database allows developers to create interactive data experiences on streaming and batch data. The startup’s customer base includes Salesforce, Atlassian, Reddit, Intercontinental Exchange, Adobe, Amazon, Pepsi, and Walmart.
Thoma Bravo Partner Robert (Tre) Sayle described Imply as “at the cusp of a market evolution in analytics,” adding that the company is helping to open up “a whole new world of analytics use cases and economic value.”
According to Shaheen, Imply has benefitted from the shift away from traditional ‘transactional’ or ‘batch-like’ databases towards “more instantaneous, real-time databases that process information ‘live.’” Amid the proliferation of cloud-based and IoT data, Shaheen claims “the value of real-time analytics will only multiply over the following decades.”
Shaheen, who heads up OMERS Growth Equity’s software vertical alongside Mark Shulgan, has previously led investments in Québec City search, AI, and analytics firm Coveo, Toronto-based restaurant software startup TouchBistro, Burnaby legaltech unicorn Clio, San Francisco-based document workflow firm PandaDoc, and developer operations platform GitLab, among others.
According to Shaheen, OMERS Growth Equity has been following the data and analytics industry closely for the past few years.
“We believe that Imply is a market leader within its niche,” said Shaheen. “Although there are some competing products, we believe that the vast majority of the addressable market is unpenetrated today, making for strong future growth prospects.”
Shaheen expects the need for databases that support real-time analytics to grow over the coming years. “We think that people do not realize how early in the adoption curve the data and analytics industry still is,” she added.
Yang, who is also a member of the C100, grew up in Canada and earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Waterloo, where he went on to complete his master’s in computer engineering—the latter of which was paid for by Cisco, which he joined post-grad as an R&D engineer.
After leaving Cisco, Yang served as lead engineer at San Francisco adtech startup Metamarkets for nearly four years, which was later acquired by Snapchat parent Snap in 2017. Metamarkets created Apache Druid, an open-source analytics database.
Yang co-founded Imply in 2015, teaming up with two other Metamarkets alums in Imply CTO Gian Merlino and Chief Experience Officer Vadim Ogievetsky, who both worked as software engineers at Metamarkets.
Imply’s Series D round follows the company’s recent March product launch of Imply Polaris, a fully-managed database-as-a-service offering built from Apache Druid. The startup plans to use the fresh capital to further build out Imply Polaris, advance open-source Druid, and expand its global presence.
Imply currently has about 220 employees, 5 to 10 of which are based in Canada across product, engineering, and go-to-market functions. By the end of the year, the startup plans to grow its staff to 300. Yang told BetaKit that the startup’s global expansion plans include Canada, where Imply intends to expand its headcount and presence to somewhere between 10 and 20 employees.
OMERS Growth Equity put out a press release on how Imply announces $100M investment led by Thoma Bravo to drive the market shift to modern analytics applications:
BURLINGAME, CA, May 17, 2022 - Imply Data, Inc., the company founded by the original creators of Apache Druid, today announced its $100 million Series D financing which values the company at $1.1 billion.This investment round was led by Thoma Bravo with participation from OMERS Growth Equity, both new investors. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Funds, Andreessen Horowitz, and Khosla Ventures also participated in the financing. This round brings Imply’s total funding raised to date to $215 million, as the company accelerates to meet the growing need for modern analytics applications.
Demand for Imply is driven by an industry evolution in analytics led by software developers. For decades, analytics have been confined to static executive dashboards and reports powered by batch-oriented data warehouses. Increasingly, leading companies are turning to their developers to build analytics applications that deliver interactive data experiences from streaming data, and deliver real-time insights to both internal and external users. And developers at 1,000s of companies have turned to Apache Druid, the leading real-time analytics database.
This new round of funding will enable Imply to accelerate its mission to help developers become the new heroes of analytics. “In its early days, Druid was adopted for a set of use cases in a handful of industries. Today, developers have shown its applicability across all industries - and the use cases have expanded exponentially,” stated Fangjin “FJ” Yang, CEO and Co-Founder of Imply, and Co-Creator of Apache Druid. “It’s humbling to see how Apache Druid and Imply have been so instrumental in helping our customers create competitive advantages.”
This funding round is the latest milestone solidifying Imply’s position as the industry leader in this emerging category. It follows the recent product and open source innovation announced in March; specifically, the launch of Imply Polaris, the fully-managed DBaaS built from Apache Druid, and the introduction of a new multi-stage query engine that makes Druid the only database to support advanced reports and complex alerts alongside interactive, real-time analytics.
“We’re excited to lead Imply’s Series D. FJ and his team are at the cusp of a market evolution in analytics, opening up a whole new world of analytics use cases and economic value,” stated Robert (Tre) Sayle, a Partner at Thoma Bravo. “It was clear from the beginning of our relationship that we would enjoy a strong partnership with management, and they very much appreciated the level of experience we bring to the table as software-specialist investors over the last 20 years.”
“As analytics adoption continues to accelerate, software developers are demanding more real-time solutions with Apache Druid and Imply leading the category,” said Warda Shaheen, Co-Head of Software at OMERS Growth Equity. “We’re thrilled to partner with FJ and the pioneering team of inventors at Imply as they continue to build on their category leadership by driving innovation and expanding analytics use cases.”
As a leading contributor to Apache Druid, Imply delivers the complete developer experience for Druid as a fully-managed DBaaS (Imply Polaris), hybrid-managed software offering (Imply Enterprise Hybrid), and self-managed software offering (Imply Enterprise). The company builds on the speed and scalability of Apache Druid with committer-driven expertise, effortless operations, and flexible deployment to meet developers’ application requirements with ease. Organizations trust Imply’s technology to play a key role in their internally-facing and customer-facing solutions and services.
Customer and Analyst Quotes
“Providing advertisers with full transparency on engagement is a top priority. To do this, we need instant access to reports and data-driven tools," said Shariq Rizvi, Executive Vice President of Ads Monetization at Reddit. "By using Apache Druid and Imply, we can ingest multiple events straight from Kafka and our data lake, ensuring advertisers have the information they need for successful campaigns in real-time."
“As the leader in Digital Trust & Safety, we enable online businesses to prevent fraud and abuse while streamlining customer experiences. We built an anomaly detection engine called Watchtower, which uses machine learning models to detect unusual activity,” said Neeraj Gupta, SVP of Engineering and Cloud Operations at Sift. “Apache Druid and Imply help us analyze data with an interactive experience that provides us with on-demand analysis and visualization.”
“In order for Natural Intelligence to effectively match high-intent consumers with leading brands, it’s critical we capture and understand millions of end-to-end user interactions,” said Lior Schachter, CTO of Natural Intelligence. “This is why we have chosen Apache Druid and Imply, to be able to understand massive amounts of data in near real-time, from the ads consumers watch, through the entire decision-making process to ultimately power better and more personalized marketing campaigns.”
“Our platform enables enterprise teams to successfully deploy AI models and avoid AI failures by analyzing massive amounts of data telemetry to detect anomalies and performance regressions in real time. That’s why we chose Apache Druid and Imply to power our dynamic query engine. We combine both stream and batch processing, empowering our customers to interactively explore limitless amounts of statistical data profiles, metrics, and anomalies across their data and machine learning pipelines,” said Andy Dang, Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at WhyLabs, the leading AI observability company.
“It’s a breath of fresh air to see Imply expanding analytics use cases beyond business intelligence and reporting,” said Eric Kavanagh, CEO and Co-Founder, The Bloor Group. “While others are simply modernizing infrastructure for decades old workloads, Imply is blazing a new trail for real-time, analytics applications.”
To learn more:
Imply will be hosting the Druid Summit on the Road event in major cities across North America, Europe, and Asia June through September 2022. This interactive event will focus on the evolution to analytics applications with Apache Druid. Register here.
Read the blog from OMERS Growth Equity
Read the Apache Druid Success Stories eBook
Read the Imply company overview
Watch the Imply company video
About Thoma Bravo
Thoma Bravo is one of the largest private equity firms in the world, with more than $103 billion in assets under management as of December 31, 2021. The firm invests in growth-oriented, innovative companies operating in the software and technology sectors. Leveraging the firm's deep sector expertise and proven strategic and operational capabilities, Thoma Bravo collaborates with its portfolio companies to implement operating best practices, drive growth initiatives and make accretive acquisitions intended to accelerate revenue and earnings. Over the past 20 years, the firm has acquired or invested in more than 375 companies representing over $190 billion in enterprise value. The firm has offices in Chicago, Miami and San Francisco. For more information, visit www.thomabravo.com.
About Imply
At Imply, we are on a mission to help developers become the new heroes of analytics. Our unique database, built from Apache Druid, enables them to develop the next generation of analytics applications. With Imply, developers can build without constraints as our database lets them create interactive data experiences on streaming and batch data with limitless scale and at the best economics. Backed by leading investors including Thoma Bravo, a16z and Bessemer Venture Partners, Imply is on a fast growth trajectory – disrupting the $100B database market – with customers including Salesforce, Atlassian, Reddit, and Intercontinental Exchange. To learn more, please visit: https://imply.io/.
© 2022 Imply. All rights reserved. Imply, the Imply logo, and Imply Polaris are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Imply Data, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. Apache, Apache Druid, Druid and the Druid logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the USA and/or other countries. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.
It was a somewhat busy day for me but I wanted a post a comment on this as it struck me for a lot of reasons.
First, we have a lot of great talent in Canada which then leaves for the US to work at top technology companies.
This is a great story and it's obvious FJ Yang and the other co-founders of Imply are well known among top VC investors in Silicon Valley as well as Thoma Bravo, one of the leading private equity funds in the world investing in software companies.
They met at Metamarkets before starting Imply, a company powering analytics applications that deliver interactive data experiences at any scale.
They are the original creators of Apache Druid, an open-source analytics database.
I read a very interesting comment on Imply's site from David Wang on why building analytics for external users is a whole new animal.
Admittedly, most of the technical jargon is way over my head but I did get his conclusion:
Lastly, build what you need today but future-proof it
Like our customers at Atlassian,Twitter, and Citrix, your external analytics applications are going to be critical to customer stickiness and revenue. And that’s why it’s important to build the right data architecture.
While your app might not have 70K DAUs off the bat (like Target’s Druid-based apps), the last thing you want is to start with the wrong database and then deal with the headaches as you scale. Thankfully, Druid can start small and easily scale to support any app imaginable.
Did you catch the part of how your external analytics are going to be critical to customer stickiness and revenue?
Imply’s database allows developers to create interactive data experiences on streaming and batch data. The startup’s customer base includes Salesforce, Atlassian, Reddit, Intercontinental Exchange, Adobe, Amazon, Pepsi, and Walmart.
This is a truly impressive startup which already has incredibly well-known Goliaths as part of its customers.
I am also impressed with Warda Shaheen, Co-Head of Software at OMERS Growth Equity:
Last December, she was named to GrowthCap's Top 40 Under 40 list.:
We are pleased to announce Warda Shaheen, Director, OMERS Growth Equity has been named to GrowthCap's Top 40 Under 40 list. This award recognizes some of the industry’s top investors, who inspire others through their work, and contributions to our communities.
Warda joined the OMERS Growth Equity team in 2019, and co-leads the software vertical alongside Mark Shulgan. Warda has led investments in companies such as Coveo, TouchBistro, PandaDoc, Gitlab, Clio, Phenom and Celigo. In 2021, Warda was formally named a Kauffman Fellow– joining one of the world’s premier innovation-focused leadership development programs.
Congratulations to Warda and all the other recipients - read the full profile here.
She obviously knows her stuff and she's spot on: "The value of real-time analytics will only multiply over the following decades. We are excited about the company’s massive [total addressable market], strong product, and exceptional management team.”
And Thoma Bravo Partner Robert (Tre) Sayle described Imply as “at the cusp of a market evolution in analytics,” adding that the company is helping to open up “a whole new world of analytics use cases and economic value.”
I am also excited and look forward to tracking Imply's success more closely as it revolutionizes instantaneous, real-time data analytics over the next decade.
I love stories like this, these are the disruptors revolutionizing data analytics and to have a Canadian co-founding this company, well. it should make us all proud.
You can read more news from OMERS Growth Equity here.
Below, Imply is founded by the original creators of Apache Druid, the most popular database for modern analytics applications. See the company co-founders and others discuss what they're doing and why they're growing fast.