Imply Closes $70 Million Series C at $700M Valuation to Extend Leadership as Foundational Platform for Analytics-in-Motion

Imply, the pioneer of Analytics-in-Motion, and founded by the original creators of Apache Druid, today announced the closing of a $70 million Series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Tiger Global Management, bringing total funding to over $116 million. Existing investors A16Z, Khosla Ventures and Geodesic Capital also participated in this round. This additional funding follows a banner year for Imply, growing market adoption of both Imply and open source Apache Druid. Imply has now surpassed 100 enterprise and digital-native customers, using Imply as the engine for analytics-powered applications that they build, and/or as a complete solution to directly solve internal BI and operational analytics use cases. The additional funding will extend Imply’s market leadership in the rapidly growing area of Analytics-in-Motion.

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“As the leader in Digital Trust & Safety, Sift leverages advanced machine learning to ensure our customers can accurately detect and prevent fraud”

“The world of analytics is being upended, as it is now a competitive disadvantage to wait hours or days to iterate on insights, to make decisions based on stale data, or to leverage solutions that either crumble or cost a fortune at scale,” said Elliott Robinson, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “Every day, more and more established enterprises and digital natives realize the power of Analytics-in-Motion, and Imply is far ahead in this race to redefine analytics across the enterprise, with numerous marquee customers and demonstrated customer success worldwide.”

Analytics-in-Motion is the new requirement for digital transformation, and has emerged due to the demands of modern business and the limitations of existing analytics solutions to meet these demands. Imply’s unique technology removes the handcuffs to effective analytics by delivering all four attributes organizations require for effective analytics:

1. Interactive queries: questions do not need to be predetermined and organizations get an engine and an app/UI, not only a database; queries can be created on-the-fly, answers are provided immediately, and insights are generated at the speed of thought (sub-second OLAP queries, self-service data analytics, point-and-explore integrated UI)
2. Unlimited scale: purpose-built to scale (high query concurrency, PB+ data volumes, high ingestion throughput)
3. Real-time and historical data loads: insights can be derived from data in motion and the present can be compared to the past (Kafka/Kinesis integrations, data lake integrations, flexible and adaptive schemas)
4. Best price/performance: built to scale with maximum cost efficiency (configurable price/performance, predictable performance and costs, fine-tune based on usage)

The combination of these four requirements enables a broad set of new customer outcomes and will place analytics-in-motion as a defining characteristic of how every successful organization operates.

New Customer Outcomes Driven by Analytics-in-Motion

Leading organizations leverage analytics-in-motion as: (1) the analytics engine behind analytics-powered applications centered around security, operational and business insights; and (2) a complete solution to solve internal BI and operational analytics use cases.

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Analytics engine for analytics-powered applications
Designed for developers and product managers

• Network endpoint analytics in motion: “Companies that rely on the Internet for their business depend on ThousandEyes’ leading Cloud and Internet Intelligence platform to ensure seamless digital experiences for their customers and employees,” said Murtaza Doctor, Head of Engineering & Operations at Cisco ThousandEyes. “To build our industry-leading solutions, we leverage the most advanced technologies, including Imply and Druid, which provides an interactive, highly scalable, and real-time analytics engine, helping us create differentiated offerings.”
• Fraud detection in motion: “As the leader in Digital Trust & Safety, Sift leverages advanced machine learning to ensure our customers can accurately detect and prevent fraud,” said Neeraj Gupta, SVP, Engineering & Cloud Operations at Sift. “Imply and Druid offer a unique set of benefits to Sift as the analytics engine behind Watchtower, our automated monitoring tool. Imply provides us with real-time data ingestion, the ability to aggregate data by a variety of dimensions from thousands of servers, and the capacity to query across a moving time window with on-demand analysis and visualization.”
• Gaming analytics in motion: “As a leading provider of analytics in the mobile gaming space, a key aspect of our competitive differentiation is the depth of reporting we provide to our customers. To accelerate our customers’ success, we wanted to build a customer-facing analytics application that combined the performance of pre-computed queries with the ability to issue arbitrary ad-hoc queries without restrictions,” said Ioana Hreninciuc, CEO of GameAnalytics. “We selected Imply and Druid as the engine for our analytics application, as they are built from the ground up for interactive analytics at scale. In addition, for our internal analytics, Imply Pivot has become the tool of choice for our support and product teams to explore all of our data in a flexible way.”
• Product Usage Analytics in motion: “Strivr’s Immersive Learning platform is revolutionizing hiring and training through Virtual Reality (VR),” said Aneesh Kulkarni, VP of Engineering at Strivr. “Analytics is critical to our platform as it provides customers with a unique level of data-driven insights from immersive training experiences. We chose Imply and Druid as our analytics database due to its scalable and cost-effective analytics capabilities, as well as its flexibility to analyze data across multiple dimensions. It is key to powering the analytics engine behind our interactive, customer-facing dashboards surfacing insights derived over telemetry data from immersive experiences.”

Complete solution for internal analytics use cases
Designed for anyone needing to understand data

• Observability Analytics in motion: “Plaid’s mission is to unlock financial freedom,” said Gordon Worley, Sr. Staff Software Engineer at Plaid. “To do that, we’ve built a world-class observability platform that allows our customers to offer the best fintech experiences to their users. Four things are crucial for observability analytics; interactive queries, scale, real-time ingest, and price/performance. That is why we chose Imply and Druid.”
• Advertising Analytics in motion: “Ippen Digital is a pioneer in helping publishers transition to new sources of digital revenue, and analytics is central for us to deliver sophisticated use of audience data and deliver content recommendations,” said Jan Ippen, CEO of Ippen Digital. “Using Imply and Druid, we are able to aggregate and analyze all information, details and dimensions of advertising data from our upstream providers. We can now perform real-time exploratory analytics on advertiser behavior, which enables us to build a differentiated offering to our customers. Imply and Druid are core to our success as a digital advertising platform.”

“In the modern world, what worked yesterday often doesn’t work today. Analytics-in-Motion will power the next frontier of digital transformation — the movement away from analytics solutions that are expensive, slow, and static, and towards analytics solutions that are highly scalable, cost effective, and enable customers to quickly get to the ‘a-ha’ moment,” said Fangjin Yang, CEO of Imply. “Bessemer Venture Partners shares our vision to re-define how organizations gain value from analytics, and we are thrilled to welcome them as our newest investor and to welcome Elliott Robinson to our Board of Directors. We are also thrilled to welcome two new executives to Imply in the wake of our Series C funding: our CMO, Praveen Rangnath (most recently at Confluent) and VP of Customer Success, Kevin Hodgkins (most recently at Fivetran).”