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RisingWave Labs, a streaming data processing platform company, announced today that it has raised $36 million in Series A funding led by Yunky Partners, undisclosed corporate investors and angel investors. With RisingWave’s total revenue exceeding $40 million, CEO Yingjun Wu said it will be used to expand the startup’s business side operations to support the launch of its new cloud service, RisingWave Cloud.
Wu founded RisingWave in 2021 after working on streaming and database systems for over a decade, including at IBM and Amazon Web Services. While at AWS Redshift, he said he noticed that database systems like AWS Redshift, Snowflake, and BigQuery couldn’t process data efficiently, and that existing streaming systems were generally too complex for most companies to use.
“I founded RisingWave Labs to simplify a cloud database system that efficiently supports streaming,” Wu told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Building real-time applications using streaming data should not incur operational costs and be a barrier to entry. RisingWave aims to provide SQL users with an easy way to begin their streaming processing journey.”
To step back for a moment, streaming is processing data in motion – in other words, computing directly as the data is being produced or received. In the streaming paradigm, application logic, analytics, and queries exist continuously, and data flows through them continuously. Stream processing applications respond to events from streams, such as triggering an action or updating statistics. That’s the opposite of immutable, non-releasable configurations where data is stored in a database and applications compute on top of it as needed, preventing the data from being processed concurrently.
Wu makes the case that due to complexity and high cost of ownership, only companies with deep pockets and data analytics expertise can adopt existing streaming solutions. Through RisingWave, he intends to change that with an open-source streaming database that allows users to write code to process data continuously. The architecture separates the compute layer from the storage, maximizing the efficiency of cloud resources, Wu says.
Image Credits: RisingWave Labs
Wu notes that among other use cases, RisingWave will support AI and machine learning applications, streaming data to AI systems to train and train them. It can also create real-time dashboards (such as traffic regions in a city), build services that provide general information about a topic (such as the number of likes received on Twitter), and analyze and discover anomalies using SQL.
“Traditional database systems have not been able to provide the power of streaming processing that allows users to make real-time decisions based on the most recent results,” Wu said. “The cost efficiencies built into our product using a modern cloud-native architecture are very attractive to C-suite level managers. Since RisingWave requires only SQL knowledge for any new users, ease of use increases developer productivity in addition to capital and operational costs.”
RisingWave’s current focus is the aforementioned cloud service RisingWave Cloud, a fully managed version of the company’s database engine. Currently in preview, ahead of general availability next year, Wu said, “several” customers are actively testing the service, with partners that include Confluent, StreamNative and Redpanda.
Wu acknowledges that there are competitors in the streaming processing space, including Confluent’s KsqlDB, DeltaStream, Activeloop, Materialize, AWS Kinesis Data Analytics and several Apache Flink-based companies (see Immerok and Aiven). But neither they nor the broader slowdown in the tech industry said RisingWave’s go-to-market plans will be affected.
‘[We have] Sufficient funding for the next two years,” Wu said. “Given the difficult economic storm, we’re seeing an opportunity for new use cases, particularly in the financial services industry and others in automated fraud detection.”
Wu didn’t have revenue numbers to share when asked, but said he expects RisingWave’s headcount to grow from 40 today to 48 by the end of the year.
“We see lowering the barrier to entry to deploy streaming in both legacy and greenfield applications as critical to democratizing streaming and unlocking streaming’s true potential,” Yunqi Partners partner Yu Chen said in an emailed statement. There’s no shortage of tools for processing data streams, but RisingWave is one of the very few designed as a database and can be easily plugged into a modern data stack to make real-time data visualization a reality.
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