We’re super excited to announce today that GGV Capital has led the $15 million Series B financing in Unravel Data. We’re happy to be joined in the financing by Microsoft Ventures and existing investor Menlo Ventures. We’re sector focused at GGV, and we’ve spent lots of time researching and getting to know entrepreneurs in the big data infrastructure and multi-cloud spaces. It seemed that every path we went down led us to Unravel. In particular, we’ve been extremely impressed by Unravel’s team, their market traction and their technology.
Team. Unravel’s founding team of Kunal Agarwal and Shivnath Babu are truly exceptional. Shivnath is on the computer science faculty at Duke, where his research focused on manageability, usability and automated problem diagnosis of data-intensive systems. He created the Starfish platform while at Duke, and this work, along with Kunal joining to run the business, let the two to found Unravel. They’re joined by a very strong core executive team, including Bala Venkatrao, VP Products. Bala held senior product management positions at Cloudera and Elastic before helping Kunal and Shivnath spark Unravel in the earliest days. This team knows their problem space incredibly well and are highly respected by customers and industry players.
Market Traction. While having a purpose build founding team is a great start, Unravel’s traction with enterprise customers is also incredible. The company has already closed well known enterprise scale companies in the financial services and technology verticals as customers. We’ve spoken to several current accounts and they’re all happy, deriving lots of value from Unravel and planning to expand its use. We’ve also validated a much broader need for Unravel’s performance management technology amongst several other companies who’ve invested in big data infrastructure, both on premise and in the cloud, and the company’s pipeline continues to grow as a result.
Technology. These days, every company is a software company, and data is increasingly being used as a competitive differentiator. As more companies build out big data stacks, what’s become clear, especially as new technologies come to market, is that heterogeneity is the norm. While many big data tools provide monitoring capabilities of their own systems, Unravel has been built as an application centric, end-to-end monitoring system to give customers a complete and holistic view of their big data stack. Unravel is able to provide a single pane of glass to manage performance and utilization, ensuring maximum return on the significant investments companies are making in their big data tools and teams.
Unravel has all the ingredients that are necessary to build an important company – a great team, a big market with great customer traction and novel technology. We can’t wait to see what the future holds for the company!