runQL, led by repeat founder Rob Darling, will use the funding to fuel further sales, marketing, and product development to help data analysts and developers.
runQL, a Waterloo-based tech startup reimaging how data professionals and developers work with queries for data, today announced it has raised a $1.6M oversubscribed pre-seed funding round led by Mistral Venture Partners with participation from MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund, Inovia Capital, UW Velocity Fund, Philip Rathle (CTO of Neo4j and former head of Product for database tooling vendor Embarcadero Technologies), and other Waterloo-based founders.
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Data is growing at an unprecedented rate. In 2025, we’ll produce more data each day than all of the world’s total data storage in 2009. This explosive growth, combined with the pressures on businesses to move fast, has made Structured Query Language (SQL) the top technical skill sought after by employers. Alongside SQL, GQL (Graph Query Language/Cypher) is also seeing rapid growth, driven by the rise of AI and graph databases.
runQL is a smart query platform (integrated development environment (IDE)) purpose-built to help data professionals write queries faster, have one source of truth, and eliminate the chaos around saving, documenting, and versioning queries. With support for SQL, Neo4j Cypher, Python, and query federation, runQL helps data professionals save time and eliminate rework.
Unlike software developer-focused tools like VSCode+SQLTools+Git+Copilot, runQL is designed for data analysts-tailored to the way they work. Features like smart query suggestions, powerful search, version control, query certification, AI-assisted documentation, schema change resolution, and query optimization help build up a library of trusted queries that brings speed and order to data work.
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“Business Intelligence (BI) data teams are frustrated with the current query tools and the chaos of managing saved queries that are scattered across files in Git, Confluence, or Google Docs with inconsistent or missing documentation. In addition to that, data leaders are dealing with a growing backlog of requests from the business, wrong queries in production, lost or missing institutional knowledge, and changing business user expectations,” said Rob Darling, CEO of runQL. “runQL brings speed, order, and a single source of truth for queries — empowering BI data teams to deliver fast, trusted insights, unlike traditional tools or text-to-SQL solutions.”
“More data brings more people and more challenges, leaving data teams overwhelmed and underserved by their tools. That’s where runQL steps in. Led by a repeat successful founder, and a team that deeply understands the space, we are thrilled to support Rob and the team,” said Raif Barbaros, Partner, Mistral Venture Partners.
Working with customers across a wide range of industries including geospatial data, eCommerce, life sciences, and iOT, runQL is being used by data, product, software development, and technical sales teams. Customers have been able to save 2 hours a day in managing/documenting queries per data analyst, find and write queries 5x faster than other tools, and have been able to leverage existing queries 34% of the time. This funding will fuel further sales, marketing, and product development in our mission to help data professionals write queries faster and manage the growing number of queries used throughout their organization.
runQL is led by Rob Darling, a repeat founder who previously founded LaunchSpot, a CRM and data reporting platform acquired by Hockeystick in 2017, and briefed.in, a data platform acquired by Communitech in 2022. Rob also led the first Business Intelligence initiative for Manulife and built the data team at Communitech as CTO. The runQL team includes Kris Braun (CTO), who has held roles at Google and a YC-backed startup, Emily Chalmers (Software Engineer), with 6 years of experience as a data analyst/data engineer, and Brandon Noad (Senior Software Engineer), who was an early engineering hire at a YC-backed company that exited in 2018.
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