Andreessen Horowitz's new growth fund just invested $30 million into Imply, an open source data analytics startup taking on Microsoft and Salesforce's Tableau
- Imply, an open source data analytics startup, announced $30 million in Series B funding led by Andreessen Horowitz's new growth fund. The funding values the 4-year-old startup at $350 million.
- Imply cofounder and CEO Fangjin Yang told Business Insider that its technology is based on Apache Druid, a popular open source database project that he founded.
- This is the first Series B investment for Andreessen's growth fund, which was announced earlier this year, Andreessen partner Martin Casado told Business Insider.
- The fund typically invests in later stages, Casado explained, but Imply had reached key growth milestones uncommon for a company at that stage, and required additional capital to continue growing.
- Yang said Imply had only spent about 10% of its Series A funding, also led by Andreessen, over the last 18 months — partly by keeping its offices outside of San Francisco's pricey real estate market.
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As Silicon Valley VCs consider pulling back on big funding rounds, Andreessen Horowitz's growth fund is doubling down with its earliest-stage investment to date — a $30 million Series B round.
The storied Silicon Valley firm is leading the Series B in Imply, a 4-year-old open source data analytics startup, now valued at $350 million. It is one of the earliest rounds Andreessen's growth fund has participated in, according to partner Martin Casado, who led the firm's Series A investment in Imply through its more traditional venture fund.
"I don't think we have ever seen a company that hit these numbers so efficiently," Casado told Business Insider. "The reason for the growth investment was really because the top line was great, the size of the business is much more advanced than what you would expect, and they burned very little money to get there."
The low burn rate was especially key, according to Casado and Imply cofounder and CEO Fangjin Yang. The company had only burned through 10% of its Series A funding over the last 18 months, Yang said. It did this in part by keeping headcount low, and partly by keeping its headquarters in Burlingame, a less-trendy suburb of San Francisco where office space isn't quite so hard to come by.
After the implosion of spend-more-to-grow-more startups like WeWork, Yang's bet is apparently paying off. Investors are increasingly looking for young companies that have financial efficiency baked into their culture. When asked how Imply compared to some of those high-flying startups burning mounds of cash, Casado laughed.
"Imply is the anti-one of those," Casado said.
The engine powering the car
Yang built the technology behind Imply while working at a different startup in San Francisco. He and his team had been tasked with developing a better way to think about databases, which almost always deal with historical data — making it easy to see what happened in the past, but much harder to get a sense of what will happen in the future.
Companies like Microsoft and Tableau (now a subsidiary of Salesforce) have made analytics their stock in trade. But Yang's team saw that those kinds of solutions fell short when it came to taking data from multiple sources, all streaming in real-time, and using it all to come up with useful and actionable insights.
The team built what would ultimately become Apache Druid, a popular open source database. This approach would find itself especially useful in fields like finance or e-commerce logistics, where tons of data is flowing around at all times.
"The innovation is to think about data not as static or delayed but as a continuous flow," Yang said. "It can help users answer the 'why' behind the data, which makes data more accessible."
As demand grew, though, Yang realized that the project warranted a dedicated team. So he started Imply.
"At Imply, I like to say we are building a car around the engine. The project was the engine, and Imply is the car," Yang said.
Designed for non-technical users
Although Yang and his cofounders are themselves technical, the product itself is designed for users with little to no technical experience. Making that information more accessible is part of the reason Imply has been able to expand beyond Silicon Valley startups as customers — growth that will likely continue with the fresh influx of cash.
"Enterprise sales and the [business-to-business] model is very well understood in Silicon Valley, so you're not reinventing the wheel," Yang said. "There's a lot less risk, and the business model is much better understood, which is a very different model than something like WeWork that is potentially unproven."
Yang said the funding will help the company expand to new markets in Asia and the Middle East over the coming months, in addition to investing heavily in marketing and hiring.
Still, don't expect its culture of responsible spending to change any time soon. Asked about the San Francisco Bay Area rite of passage of landing a billboard advertisement on one of the major highways, Yang laughed.
"I think it's a little against our culture to buy a billboard on the 101," Yang joked.