DEVOPSdigest

WarpStream Labs raised $20M in funding led by Greylock and Amplify Partners.

Angel investors in the round include Ben Sigelman (CEO of Lightstep), Spencer Kimball (CEO of CockroachDB), and Barry McCardel (CEO of Hex Technologies). The company will use the funds to hire more engineers, scale their go to market team, and invest in new product lines.

WarpStream provides a drop-in replacement for Apache Kafka that runs directly on top of object storage, with no local disks. WarpStream’s primary innovation is that it separates compute from storage like a modern data lake does by using object storage (such as AWS S3) as the primary and only storage. Writing and reading directly from object storage enables WarpStream to eliminate inter-zone networking costs which often represent 80%+ of the total cost of ownership of running a large scale Kafka workload. In addition, WarpStream’s compute layer is completely stateless, enabling instant and unlimited scalability while eliminating almost all of the operational burden associated with Apache Kafka.

Starting today, the company’s “Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)” deployment option is generally available. BYOC brings all the benefits of a fully managed SaaS directly into the customer's cloud account, while still reducing costs by 5-10x compared to self hosting Apache Kafka. BYOC combines compute and storage resources within the customer’s environment, with a fully-managed control plane and metadata service that is hosted and managed by WarpStream Labs. Data never leaves the customer’s environment, and customers retain operational control of the platform.

“WarpStream will not only reduce costs and increase reliability of existing Kafka users but will expand the use of streaming data by making it easy and affordable for developers to leverage the power of Kafka with a simple and accessible cloud native solution,” said Jerry Chen, partner at Greylock and WarpStream Board Director.