e6data secures £7.5M funding to transform data intelligence and AI

Tue 17 Sep 2024

e6data has announced a £7.5 million ($10 million) Series A funding round to address the escalating costs and performance challenges associated with data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).

This funding, led by Accel Partners with participation from Beenext and others, intends to halve the costs for businesses seeking to optimise their data analytics capabilities.

e6data said Data intelligence platforms are crucial for enterprises aiming to leverage their data for business decisions, including data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and generative AI.

The company added with enterprises projected to spend £75.9 billion ($100 billion) on these platforms in 2024, the pressure to maximise ROI and manage costs is intensifying. The total addressable market for data and AI solutions is expected to reach £174.7 billion ($230 billion) by 2025, with 60% of CXOs planning to increase their spending in the coming year.

Co-founder and CEO of e6data, Vishnu Vasanth, said ‘this rapid increase has made data intelligence platforms the second largest IT spending category, behind only cloud spend for operational systems and application infrastructure’.

“It is fueling the meteoric rise of data warehouse and data lakehouse companies such as Snowflake and Databricks, and the rapid growth of corresponding offerings from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud,” added Vasanth.

e6data stressed that despite this growth, enterprises face significant ROI concerns. Technology leaders are grappling with the need to boost performance and access new capabilities while controlling costs.

“Legitimate ROI concerns stand in the way of enterprises realizing the full potential of data and AI. Moreover, organisations cannot freely move lakehouse table formats, data catalogues, compute providers, and cloud providers without adverse price-performance impacts, the need for data movement, and cumbersome application migrations,” added Vasanth.

e6data Develops Compute Engine to Address Challenges

e6data has developed a compute engine designed to address these challenges. The company said this new engine enhances ROI on existing platforms and eliminates ecosystem lock-in, requiring no data movement, application migration, or downtime. It offers five times higher performance and more than 50% savings in total cost of ownership compared to leading solutions.

The company plans to extend its Lighthouse Customer Program, which provides its solution as a managed service for critical enterprise use cases, complete with production support and professional services.

Existing compute engines, built on monolithic architectures, often struggle with cost, performance, and scalability, particularly for heavy workloads. e6data’s new architecture, based on distributed processing and Kubernetes, overcomes these limitations. The team’s experience with large-scale data intelligence platforms has informed their approach, which promises a format-neutral solution free from ecosystem lock-in.

As enterprises continue to invest heavily in data platforms, e6data’s solution aims to mitigate the pricing power of dominant vendors and offer a more flexible, cost-effective alternative.