Streamkap, a San Francisco, CA-based real-time data exchange to sync data between systems as well as between companies, raised $3.3m in seed and pre-seed funding. In conjunction with the announcement, CEO Paul Dudley replied to our questions about the company, the product, the round, and future plans.
FinSMEs: Hi Paul, can you tell us a bit more about yourself? What’s your background?
I grew up in California, and studied Physics in university, where I learned I wasn’t destined to be a scientist. I’ve worked in SaaS for my whole career. I started out at a company called NetBase doing natural language processing way before LLMs, I then helped to scale BrightEdge, an SEO platform, from single digit millions to $100M in revenue. I moved to London with BrightEdge to lead sales in Europe and when I was ready for my next challenge I went to work for my now cofounder, Ricky Thomas, at a data startup he founded called Avora. Avora didn’t work out, but we had a good partnership, so we started an ETL company based on batch data processing called Gravity Data. We sold Gravity in 2022 and started Streamkap. I’m back in San Francisco now, right in the heart of all of the exciting new stuff happening in silicon valley and cerebral valley, the hotbed specifically of AI startups.
FinSMEs: Let’s speak about Streamkap. What is the market problem you want to solve? What is the real opportunity?
At Gravity and Avora, we worked with a lot of data teams and saw a couple of key trends. One was the increasing demand for faster data. As consumers, we expect to know where our food order is in real-time, exactly when our package is being delivered, and we expect to be catered to with personalization that has the context of what we’ve just been browsing. This means more demand on businesses to deliver these experiences, both directly in customer-facing applications and operationally. The other, related, trend was that businesses were having to build streaming data platforms using a variety of open-source infrastructure projects built around Apache Kafka. Kafka is powerful, but it’s complex to manage, so data teams would spend months getting production-grade systems running. We set out to solve both those challenges, make faster data easy to access, make it affordable, and enable companies to deliver better customer experiences for their customers and employees.
FinSMEs: What are the features differentiating the product from competitors?
- Latency and cost: Compared to batch ETL tools like Fivetran, Streamkap operates with significantly lower latency, delivering sub-second performance versus Fivetran’s 15-minute standard plan. Additionally, our solution is more cost-effective, providing lower total costs.
- All-in-one application experience: Unlike managed Kafka providers, which offer raw infrastructure, Streamkap provides a comprehensive application experience. This encompasses high-quality connectors, serverless scaling, and end-to-end monitoring and alerting.
- In-stream transformations: Streamkap supports in-stream transformations, enabling real-time data processing, which is not feasible with batch ETL tools and is even more complicated to manage with streaming infrastructure.
- Ease of use and deployment: The platform is designed as a “set and forget” solution. Streamkap works out of the box without requiring the active management and specialized skills needed for managed Kafka, significantly reducing the time to value and production pipeline setup from months to minutes.
- Total Cost of Ownership: Streamkap’s integrated approach results in a lower total cost of ownership by eliminating the need for extensive engineering and DevOps resources and ongoing management.
FinSMEs: You just raised a new funding round. Please, tell us more about it.
InReach Ventures led the round, we met Roberto Bonanzinga and the team early on in our journey. We found Roberto to be refreshingly direct and helpful, even before we were ready to raise from him, so when the time came to put together a seed round we reconnected and pretty quickly worked to put together the round. We had Ten13 come in with significant participation in the round. Haatch Ventures and Begin Capital participated as well, they led our pre-seed round previously and have been great partners from the very beginning. We’re excited to have this team of great investors supporting us. They believed in the vision and have been really helpful already.
FinSMEs: Can you share some numbers and achievements of the business?
We have great customers using us to power production workloads today, companies like SpotOn, Fleetio, Niche.com, BrandAlley, and NALA. We’ve got some great stories from each of them on the website with more details on the impact but in short, we’re faster, cheaper, and more reliable than previous solutions they had in place.
FinSMEs: What are your medium-term plans?
We’ve already started to invest in the team: we expanded our engineering and sales teams recently, to accelerate the pace of our innovation and keep up with demand from customers. A lot of our focus in the coming months will be deepening our streaming transformation capabilities built around Flink. We’re also always adding more connectors, and have a number which we’ve gotten a lot of requests for. We’ve been pretty busy lately with some unusually urgent requests related to migrating workloads of Rockset. Rockset was acquired by OpenAI at the end of June. They gave their customers a pretty short timeline before the platform would be sunsetted. Engineering teams don’t usually have to do database migrations with an unexpectedly short timeline so we’re working hard to help those companies get that done before the deadline.
FinSMEs
05/08/2024