5
Dremio
| Power Score: 47.15 | Momentum Score: 96.47 (1) | HQ: Mountain View, CA | CEO: Billy Bosworth |
Economics
Valuation: $1 billion (+156% vs. last round, 2020)
Amt. Raised: $261.5 million
Politics
Lobbying Spend: No
Industry Orgs: No
People
Headcount:
251 (+107% YoY)
Engineering Headcount: 79 (+102% YoY)
Big Tech Experience: 11%
Open Roles: 251
Innovation
R&D Spending: N/A
Patents Applied For: 0
Patents Owned: 0
Acquisitions: No
Leadership
Exec Team Exits : No
Diversity Data: No
ESG/CSR Data : No
On Power
Dremio is small but growing at a fast pace. In January 2021, the company closed a series D funding round in which it raised $135 million at a $1 billion valuation. Dremio says it plans to use the funding to grow its global engineering centers — engineering headcount growth more than doubled over the past year, though the total headcount of 79 engineers still makes it small relative to most of the competitors on the Power Index.
On Disruption
Dremio has a lot of disruptive potential because it has taken a different approach to data warehousing. In fact, the approach is so different that Dremio's product can't even be called a data warehouse — Dremio's engine allows companies to run SQL queries directly from popular cloud storage platforms without first copying that data into a separate warehouse. (The company commissioned a study from Wakefield Research that highlighted the extent of the problem they're aiming to solve. Of the 500 executives who participated, the median number of copies of data each company had amassed in order to run analytics was 12.) In addition to the mega-round Dremio landed in January, the company announced in June that it was bringing on a few key hires, including ex-Alteryx executive Alan Gibson to be the company's chief revenue officer after already completing a year in which it doubled its revenue and customers.
Tea Leaves
In July, Dremio launched a data lake service to run on AWS's public cloud, which the company is calling an "SQL Lakehouse," highlighting the convergence of warehousing and data lake business models more broadly. Dremio also recently announced a deeper partnership with Tableau at the end of June 2021. It's familiar territory for Bosworth, who served on Tableau's board of directors until its acquisition by Salesforce in 2019 . Deeper Tableau BI integrations will bring Dremio one step closer to matching (and in some respects, surpassing) the capabilities of the database heavyweights.
They Said It
"Snowflake is classic data warehouse architecture done very well. If you want a closed architecture, they are a really good choice. Databricks is a brilliant solution for data scientists. But we are going to own SQL. You have to be good at something. The thing we are going to be very good at is SQL on the lakehouse." — CEO Billy Bosworth in a June 2021 interview with Protocol (edited for brevity and clarity)