DeltaStream secures cash to build real-time streaming databases – TechCrunch

DeltaStream, which is developing a streaming database platform geared toward enterprise customers, today announced that it raised $10 million in a seed round led by New Enterprise Associates. The funding will be put toward product development, CEO Hojjat Jafarpour told TechCrunch in an email interview, as well as hiring five new employees by the end of the year (DeltaStream currently has 10 employees).

DeltaStream provides a serverless streaming database to manage, secure and process data streams. “Serverless” refers to the way DeltaStream abstracts away infrastructure, allowing developers to interact with databases without having to think about servers.

Jafarpour started DeltaStream after spending several years building ksqlDB, Confluent’s streaming database platform that runs on top of Kafka — Kafka being the Apache open source project for high-throughput, low-latency data feed handling. Prior to Confluent, Jafarpour was a research staff member at NEC, a principal software engineer at Informatica and a tech lead and manager at Quantcast.

“Internet users today expect tailored, real-time digital interactions online and delivering these experiences requires processing data at millisecond speeds. Failure to keep up results in lower revenue due to unhappy or lost customers, and increased costs from an inability to catch downtime or fraud fast enough,” Jafarpour said. “Yet processing data in real time remains inaccessible to most businesses. Most of the existing solutions either process data in minutes or hours since they are batch-based or they require expensive, specialized teams to deploy and scale. DeltaStream solves this challenge with a cloud-native, real-time stream processing solution that is easy to use and automatically scalable while still remaining cost-effective.”

DeltaStream ostensibly solves this challenge, Jafarpour says, by connecting to event stores — databases optimized for storing events — and performing compute and storage tasks. The platform provides a compute layer on top of streaming storage systems like Kafka and AWS Kinesis, allowing users to read data from one or more services, perform computations and write the results across different storage sources simultaneously.

“Accessing data in real time and reacting to it provides significant competitive advantages for enterprises and not having such capability can result in significant losses,” Jafarpour said. “DeltaStream unlocks the value of real-time data for companies without requiring them to have an army of engineers with database and distributed systems skills.”

DeltaStream, having recently emerged from stealth, isn’t the only real-time database vendor around. Materialize and Activeloop come to mind, as does the aforementioned Confluent. But Jafarpour asserted that the company is “well-positioned to keep growing and building product regardless of the potential headwinds.”

Time will tell.

“Building real-time streaming applications requires engineering teams with skills in data management, distributed systems. There is a fierce competition for such talent and many enterprises are not able to enjoy the luxury of having such teams,” Jafarpour said. “Turning data into action in real time has become an essential part of data infrastructure in organizations. Accessing data in real time and reacting to it provides significant competitive advantages for enterprises and not having such capability can result in significant losses.”