Immerok, developers of a serverless Apache Flink cloud platform for real-time stream processing, announced it has closed on a $17 million seed funding round led by Cusp Capital, 468 Capital, Cortical Ventures, and  Essence VC along with participation from several angel investors, including Apache Flink co-creator, Stephan Ewen.

“Businesses today differentiate themselves by data, so the most strategic IT initiatives right now center around data-intensive applications to support AI/ML models as well as realtime and predictive analytics,” said Holger Temme, Co-founder and CEO of Immerok. “Stream processing, and with it Apache Flink, are fundamental to those systems, and until now, organizations have required specialists to build, operate, and scale those streaming applications—specialists that are expensive, and scarce. Immerok will make it easy for organizations to build modern real-time systems by closing the existing gap between stream processing and cloud native applications.”

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Apache Flink is an open source stream processing engine that already powers many of the world’s largest real-time ecommerce, entertainment, and financial services systems. The Immerok service will make it possible for anyone to leverage the full power of Flink to meet a range of real-time business needs from fast data pipelines and user-facing analytics, to real-time ML/AI and transaction processing.

“ING has been one of the early adopters of Apache Flink,” said Erik de Nooij, Engineering Lead at ING. “Starting with a POC in 2016 which evolved to a global platform that has become the de facto standard for streaming applications within ING. The next step in this evolution is to adopt a SQL-first approach and a tighter integration with the data lake where machine learning models are being trained. This next step will put ING on a trajectory where analytic capabilities are put in the hands of a wider target audience resulting in more data-driven decisions.”

The company will use the funds to continue to build and launch its fully-managed cloud service for Apache Flink that is now available to Early Access Program users on AWS. Immerok plans to expand support to other cloud platforms in the future. The company will also use funding to grow its team. Immerok has 20 employees with plans to grow to 30 by year’s end and is hiring for roles in engineering, community relations, and customer success. Current openings are available on the Immerok Careers page.

“The future of Apache Flink is in good hands with Immerok,” said Stephan Ewen, co-creator of Apache Flink. “I spent many years working with the Immerok co-founders. They have deep knowledge of stream processing and cloud-native computing, they build really solid technology, and love working with the community of Flink users. I’m excited to be working with them as an advisor.”

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“Demand for streaming analytics applications is booming,” said Florian Leibert with 468 Capital. “We are excited to be working with Immerok and are confident that they are the right team to bring real-time computing into the mainstream to help businesses revolutionize the way they operate.”