Former AWS and IBM database engineer builds a company to deliver a simple, affordable cloud-native streaming database for real-time application development and decision-making

RisingWave Labs, the streaming database company, announced a $36 million round of funding to meet surging demand for streaming databases that enable users to make real-time decisions based on the most recent data. The Series A round, led by multiple partners, including the investment arm of a leading global gaming firm, Yunqi Partners, and several individual investors, brings the total funding to over $40 million.

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Democratizing Stream Processing

Stream processing allows users to continuously gain timely, actionable insights from real-time data and bring immense business value to companies across different verticals, such as Financial Services, Health & Life Sciences, Manufacturing & Industrials, and others. Due to the complexity and high ownership cost, however, only companies with deep pockets and data analytics expertise can adopt existing stream processing solutions.

“Companies are adopting streaming systems to support real-time applications at a rapid clip,” said Yingjun Wu, founder and CEO of RisingWave Labs. “Existing open-source systems are very costly to deploy, maintain, and use in the modern cloud environment. Our goal is not to build yet another streaming system that is 10X faster than existing systems, but to deliver a simple and cost-effective system that allows everyone to benefit from stream processing.”

Prior to starting RisingWave Labs, Yingjun Wu was a software engineer at Amazon Web Services, where he was a key member of the Redshift data warehouse team, and before that a researcher at the Database group in IBM Almaden Research Center. Yingjun received his PhD degree from National University of Singapore and was also a visiting PhD at Carnegie Mellon University. Yingjun has been working in the stream processing and database area for over a decade, and he firmly believes that stream processing is ready to disrupt batching systems by empowering users with the ability of gaining real-time insights.

RisingWave Labs aims to democratize stream processing with RisingWave, an open-source, cloud-native SQL streaming database for modern real-time applications. With Postgres-compatible SQL as the interface to manage and query data, users can write simple SQL code to continuously process streaming data. RisingWave has adopted cloud-native architecture that separates the compute layer from the storage to maximize the efficiency of cloud resources.

“Lowering the barrier to entry to deploy stream processing in both legacy and green field applications is critical in enabling companies to gain insights in real time,” said Yu Chen, partner of Yunqi Partners. “There is no lack of tools to process data streams, but RisingWave is one of the few designed as a database and can be easily plugged into a modern data stack to make real-time data intelligence a reality.”

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Stream Processing for Business-Critical Applications
RisingWave users have seen early success in a number of key areas:

• Real-time Analytics and Alerting: Analyzes millions of metrics in real time and detects anomalies using SQL.
• IoT Device Tracking: Creates real-time dashboards that show traffic in every region across the city based on the sensors installed on each road.
• Monitoring User activity: Builds microservices that provide aggregated information about a subject, such as the number of likes received on a tweet.
• Online Application Data Serving: Pre-aggregates data on multiple dimensions and serves via read-optimized storage.

RisingWave Labs: The Road Ahead

Since RisingWave Labs’ inception in 2021, the focus has been on building a successful open-source project and garnering community support.

Commenting on the next steps, Rayees Pasha, Head of Product at RisingWave Labs, said, “We chose to develop in an open-source project because it allows us to grow a thriving community. RisingWave users are providing valuable feedback, directly influencing the RisingWave feature roadmap. Leveraging the funds raised in this milestone round, we will grow our engineering and customer support teams. Working with partners like Confluent, StreamNative, and Redpanda, we are motivated to build a ‘Modern Streaming Data Stack’ with end-to-end enterprise-grade streaming data offerings.”

As a commercial open-source software (COSS) company, RisingWave Labs plans to monetize the open-source database by offering cloud services. The company recently launched the preview version of RisingWave Cloud for early access customers and partners with general availability in 2023.