Onehouse emerged last year as a cloud data lake product built on the open source Apache Hudi project. Rather than competing directly with big data lake providers like Snowflake and Databrick, the startup wants to act as an integration layer to move data between different repositories.
Today, the company raised $25 million in Series A.
The company’s founder and CEO Vinot Chander came up with the idea for Hoodie in 2016 when he was an engineer at Uber and eventually decided to start a company based on an open source project. Today, he says, the idea is to be independent and an additional layer between these other data lake products and to be able to interact with multiple formats regardless.
“Our thesis is that we live in a multi-engine world where there are more and more engines that evolve and sit on the same data. We want to help organizations avoid migrating every time a new engine comes out,” Chandar told TechCrunch.
The open-source project is gaining momentum with 2,200 pull requests on GitHub last year and more than 600 engaged users on the GitHub platform, according to the company.
A percentage of those open-source users will eventually want to move to managed cloud services, and the company is working on a product with paying customers today. For now, though, product chief Kyle Weller says the cloud product remains in preview mode at a manageable number of paying customers.
We’re still in preview mode as we build out and train our entire global support team and some of these other building blocks and pieces to get a handle on how many people will be coming through the door.
With the new cash, the company was able to double its team, which grew from 15 to 30 at the time of last year’s seed announcement. The startup has largely focused on recruiting engineering talent, but Chandar says the emphasis is changing. “Last year we hired more on the product and engineering side, but at the current level of business, we are more focused on hiring and expanding our marketing team,” he said.
The $25 million Series A closed in the second half of last year, and is led by Addition and Greylock, the same firms that led the seed round. The new funds raised totaled $33 million.
