Today we are happy to announce our Series B investment in Matillion alongside our friends at Sapphire Ventures.
At ScaleVP we continue to be excited by companies that sit at the nexus of the public cloud and the trend of “data everywhere,” which we broadly define as the need to unify disparate data sets to answer critical business questions. The last few years have seen companies in every imaginable industry migrating from an on-premise data warehouse to cloud data warehouses like Redshift, BigQuery, and Snowflake. Growing data volumes, coupled with the time-consuming management and tuning required to maintain an on-premise data warehouse, just doesn’t make sense in an era where the cloud offers elasticity, cost savings, and simplicity. Companies are quickly finding that moving to the cloud data warehouse is a no-brainer.
In light of this secular shift in data warehousing technology, the ability to connect your various data sources, ranging from HubSpot to Salesforce, to this central cloud repository becomes more important and is exactly the problem Matillion is tackling. Previous generations of ETL tools have grown up to become big companies like Informatica, and we believe the move to the cloud data warehouse supports a next-generation company like Matillion.
Matillion is leveraging its close relationships with Snowflake, BigQuerry, and Redshift to build a product that is aligned with the cloud data warehouse from both an architectural and sales standpoint. The fact that Matillion’s product was designed for the cloud data warehouses has allowed it to move away from the traditional ETL model (extract-transform-load) to an ELT model (extract-load-transform). In short, Matillion relies on the cloud data warehouse to do the transform and doesn’t need to reformat the data before it is loaded into the data warehouse. The advantage of this ELT approach is speed and computational savings, which matters in a world of exploding data volumes.
Bottoms-Up Adoption
Matillion is architected to be incredibly simple to use, a dramatic departure from previous generations of tools. The faster learning curve and the ability of Matillion to reduce the cost of data integration development is one of the primary reasons why Matillion is currently the second-highest rated product on the AWS marketplace. The company philosophically believes in an intuitive drag-and-drop approach to data pipeline management, bringing the ability to manage a data pipeline to individuals who might not be certified “data architects”, but are still involved in the day-to-day work of data wrangling. While the product is sophisticated enough to support complex environments at big companies like General Electric and Price Waterhouse Coopers, customers are unanimous that the product’s simplicity, short set-up, and clean UI make it an incredibly attractive choice.
OSS can be a pain to maintain
Furthermore, we believe the proximity of the data warehouse to business users means it would be a folly to cobble together a solution from open source tools. This is increasingly mission-critical to enterprises and the functionality is similar enough across customers that a paid product with enterprise functionality makes sense. As the number of data sources proliferate, large companies don’t want to spend their engineering resources on building and maintaining the various connectors necessary to load data from the numerous sources into the cloud data warehouse: we believe instead they will turn to Matillion.
Companies changing the future of work can come from anywhere
Moving forward, we couldn’t be more excited to partner with Matthew Scullion and the rest of his UK-based team as they continue to execute on an ambitious product roadmap. It’s interesting to note that this is our second European investment in 2018, following on the heels of our investment in Lisbon-based Unbabel, which is focused on AI-powered human translation at scale. We have always believed that great companies are built around the world, and our investments in Matillion (UK), Unbabel (Portugal), WalkMe (Israel), JFrog (Israel), Forter (Israel), and Treasure Data (Japan) reflect our efforts to be open-minded to great founders and companies with international backgrounds. As Thomas Friedman likes to say, the world is flat, and we believe our investment choices should reflect this sentiment.
Jeremy Kaufmann contributed to this blog post
