New platform gives developers a comprehensive and extensible data access platform for programming using databases; company has raised $5M in seed funding led by Foundation Capital
Cloud Data API innovator Neurelo, emerged from stealth, introducing a comprehensive and extensible data access platform that enhances developer productivity by simplifying and accelerating the way they build and run applications with databases. The Neurelo Cloud Data API Platform is generally available as of today, providing auto-generated, purpose-built REST and GraphQL APIs, AI-generated custom-query endpoints, deep query observability, and Schema as Code. The company also announced it has secured $5 million in seed funding led by Foundation Capital with participation from Cortical Ventures, Secure Octane Investments and Aviso Ventures.
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“Programming with data needs to be abstracted and simplified just like what we have seen with compute, storage and networking”
Neurelo was co-founded by Chirag Shah, CEO, and Guru Kamat, CTO who have both experienced first-hand the challenges of building and running applications at scale. Shah formerly led MongoDB’s database product organization, where he was part of the core product leadership team that helped drive business growth from $350M to $1.2B in ARR. Prior to MongoDB, he worked with the product and go-to-market teams at VMware. Kamat previously led the Prisma Cloud Engineering team at Palo Alto Networks, where he worked through some of the toughest problems that developers face to scale the Prisma platform to handle billions of cloud workloads under management in less than three years.
“We developed Neurelo so that the developers working to deliver the hundreds of millions of applications that will be brought to market in the next five years will be able to automate solutions to their hardest data problems and focus on feature excellence and lowering time to market,” said Kamat. “Neurelo’s application of AI and automation to API generation means that today’s developers don’t have to struggle the way that so many, including myself and my teams, had to in the past. We are very proud to be bringing a compelling new programming interface for databases to market today and can’t wait to see what our users will build with Neurelo.”
“Developers spend many hours a day on overhead tasks that prevent them from writing actual business code. Fiddling with database connections, SQL queries, data APIs, and data compliance and security is high up on this list of overhead tasks and, excitingly, it is exactly what Neurelo addresses,” said Torsten Volk, managing research director, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). “Neurelo turns data sources into centrally controlled and governed APIs that developers can simply consume instead of having to worry about the intricacies of the specific type of database. The ability for DBAs, cloud admins, IAM admins, and other relevant roles to ensure consistency and compliance of individual databases organization-wide instead of chasing after each data source separately is a significant upside of the Neurelo platform.”
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“Developers worldwide are embracing Cloud and GenAI to build and modernize apps, driving down the cost of experimentation and fostering innovation. Despite these advances, the consistent feedback from developers has been that dealing with databases still remains complex and time-consuming,” said Shah. “To tackle these challenges, developers can enhance their approach by abstracting dependencies between applications and databases through Neurelo’s comprehensive data access layer, streamlining the entire software development lifecycle. This also ensures future-proof compatibility with diverse architectures, from monoliths and microservices, to serverless and functions as services in general. At Neurelo, we see this layer as a crucial part of the tech-stack and a must have for every developer. We are excited to bring this innovation to the market.”
Neurelo innovations introduced today include:
- Auto-generated APIs – Neurelo instantly generates purpose-built REST and GraphQL APIs for data access from applications, eliminating developer reliance on ORM and server-side frameworks. Unlike other platforms that generate generic APIs that are limited and often ineffective, Neurelo ensures that its APIs are specifically developed to meet the needs of the application being built. It also automates API documentation and version control, in addition to eliminating the need for third-party query builders and automatically handles dynamically changing code and schemas as the application demands.
- AI-generated custom-query endpoints – Neurelo enables application developers to use AI to easily generate and fine-tune custom complex queries with optimization recommendations using natural language prompts, regardless of the database type or language. Neurelo trains its AI models on database-specific syntax and semantics, resulting in query code generation efficacy ranging from 75 to 90 percent, well above the industry average of around 50 percent. Neurelo’s innovative approach to AI-generated queries eliminates the writing of the hundreds of lines of code that complex queries often require, along with the expert analysis, rewriting, manipulation and modification needed to iterate on new application features.
- Query observability – Neurelo establishes and maintains developer trust by showing them exactly what is happening with every API as they are called. With Neurelo, every read and write operation gives developers an improved understanding of day-to-day application posture. This understanding helps developers identify and remediate hotspots, bottlenecks, noisy neighbors and other complexities.
- Schema as Code – Neurelo automates how developers create, deploy, and evolve their schema, enabling developers to easily manage application and database changes without manual intervention. It provides a centralized, codified repository – a central source of truth – for automated collection and management of metadata across all aspects of database programming. This eliminates the Visio diagrams and other arduous manual processes developers often must use just to capture schema. This results in faster iteration cycles and ensures a more robust, reliable, and easily-maintainable database architecture.
“Programming with data needs to be abstracted and simplified just like what we have seen with compute, storage and networking,” said Sid Trivedi, Partner at Foundation Capital. “Chirag and Guru come to this problem with decades of experience at the intersection of data, API and developer experience. We believe this is a massive untapped market and are excited to partner with the team to build Neurelo.”
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