Bobsled, a startup building a cross-cloud data sharing platform, announced today that it has raised a $17 million Series A funding round co-led by greycroft and Madrona Venture Group. This round follows a $7 million seed round led by .406 Companies. In this most recent round, Bobsled’s valuation was $87 million.
Before founding Bobsled in late 2021, the company’s CEO and co-founder jake graham He was a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft Azure and worked on Azure Data Exchange. Graham, who has also previously worked at Neo4j and Intel, believes that data sharing will be a fundamental change in the analytics landscape.
“It’s the next evolution of how companies actually get access to the data they need to drive machine learning analytics, data science, you name it,” he said. “I’ve been building in the data infrastructure space for about a decade and that APIs and SFTP were the way data was moved was just one of those things that I accepted. It wasn’t until I really started looking into it that it was: it shouldn’t be. This doesn’t make much sense. These are built for an older data paradigm.”
Image Credits: Bobsleigh
Graham also believes that it is important that the clouds and the data platform create the building blocks of what a native exchange protocol should look like.
“If you believe that data sharing is the way the world is going to play out and that there is going to be much more active collaboration on data between source and destination, there needs to be something that brings all these different platforms together, because you don’t there’s no right cloud, there’s no right data store, there’s no right layer of the stack for you to share data,” he said.
Bobsled, unsurprisingly, believes that it may be this third-party data sharing neural platform that can enable companies to connect their various data sources in a more native way. The service uses the exchange protocol of each platform and then connects the various sources and helps companies prepare the data sets for consultation.
Image Credits: Bobsleigh
Some of the common use cases here are SaaS applications that may want to share AWS S3 application data on a customer’s Azure storage, for example, or a data team that wants to move sales data from Azure to S3 for its analysis.
Obviously, there are other companies that are focused on this type of data transfer and transformation space. But Graham believes that with these ELT platforms like Fivetran, the consumer still has to work too hard. “A lot of what ELT platforms are actually doing should be done by the source of the data,” he said. “So we’re shifting to the left a lot of that. If you separate the letters, extract: you’re doing it because it’s not shared with you. Burden? The same thing. If you’re getting a share inside Databricks, you’re not uploading anything.” Regarding data transformation, he noted that most of the time, the data is in a transactional data model that must be formatted for analysis and the source must transform that data, although he believes that transforming data from multiple data sources data to match a given schema is always going to be up to the consumer.
“I wouldn’t directly call us an ELT product yet because we’re different enough, but I think that’s the closest thing to the category we’re building. It’s just a different user,” Graham explained.
The company plans to use the new funds to develop its platform, primarily with a focus on support for more data sources (including old-school SFTP sources).
“The promise of AI only increases the urgency and increases the priority for companies to realize the value of their data,” said Madrona CEO S. Somasegar. “Even within companies and between partners, that data is now spread across platforms that are not designed to work together. BobsleighThe unique cross-cloud data exchange approach will unlock the value of data that has hitherto been complex, slow and expensive to access.”
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