With the fresh funds, the company said it wants to double down on its research and development (R&D) efforts to help its customers with better offerings, onboard more clients and scale its hiring on the go-to-market front.
“Enterprises that are ahead of the curve in terms of data maturity tend to be more dominant in their industries because they leverage analytics platforms to crunch various types of unstructured and semi-unstructured data,” cofounder and CEO Vishnu Vasanth told ET.
The rise of generative AI is pushing companies to organise and utilise their internal data, driving demand in the AI and analytics space, which is becoming increasingly competitive for startups like e6data, he added.
Founded in 2021, e6data has created a hyper-performance computation engine for data intelligence platforms and offers its solution as a managed service for enterprises. The platform enables large enterprise clients to process data for tasks like business intelligence reporting and generative AI workloads, increasing return on investment (RoI) while avoiding the emerging forms of ecosystem lock-in at different layers of the data stack.
The startup currently serves around 10 enterprise customers, and expects rapid growth due to rising demand for compute-intensive workloads across high-volume data products, advanced real-time analytics and generative AI applications.
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“With GenAI, enterprises are seeing a surge in analytics use cases… Over the next few years, we expect every individual in an organisation to be a power data consumer, implying a higher load on analytics and compute infrastructure. We believe e6data is primed to leverage and accelerate this movement,” said Shekhar Kirani, partner at Accel, who will be joining the company’s board.Key players in the data warehouse space include Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery, while some top data lakehouse engines are Databricks and open-source alternatives built on Trino or Presto.
According to Vasanth, e6data delivers five times higher performance at 50% lower total cost of ownership compared to traditional models.He pointed out that existing compute engines are built on monolithic architectures with centralised components for most of a query or job’s life cycle. This presents challenges related to cost, performance, concurrency handling and scalability, particularly for compute-intensive workloads as enterprises scale their operations.
The company’s team comprises 65 people, with a significant portion of its engineering workforce based in Bengaluru. The leadership team at e6data includes alumni from Cisco, ThoughtWorks, IBM, MinIO, Microsoft, Agilent, and Sigmoid. The founding team and early engineers bring experience from building, managing and optimising large-scale data platforms for enterprises using both open-source and commercial engines.
“India is a strategically important market for us because of the number of startups that have grown at a fast pace.. All these companies are powered by data and analytics and essentially consume such offerings as part of their data analytics and AI workloads. Also, every large multinational company today has global capability centers in India,” Vasanth said.
On the revenue side, e6data operates on a consumption-based model, where companies pay based on the amount of compute they use and the duration for which they consume it. According to e6data, the total addressable market (TAM) for data and AI solutions is projected to reach $230 billion by 2025, with 60% of CXOs expecting to increase their spending in the next year. However, as spending rises, companies are increasingly concerned about their RoI.