Bobsled, a startup that has built the first cross-cloud data sharing platform, announced a $24 million round of funding. The $17 Series A funding round co-led by Greycroft and Madrona very quickly follows a $7m seed round led by .406 Ventures. The most recent round of funding put the company at a $87M valuation. The company will use the funding to continue to build out its data sharing platform, which allows providers of analytics data to share data products with customers across cloud platforms. The technology revolutionizes the way data teams access data generated outside of their organization and represents an important addition to the modern data stack. With the raise, Brentt Baltimore, Soma Somasegar, and Graham Brooks join Bobsled’s Board of Directors.
“The promise of AI only heightens the urgency and increases the priority for companies to realize the value of their data,” said Madrona Managing Director S. Somasegar. “Even within enterprises and amongst partners, that data is now spread across platforms not designed to work together. Bobsled’s unique cross-cloud data sharing focus will unlock the value of data that has been complex, slow, and expensive to access until now.”
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Bobsled builds on the advances in data sharing already made by major platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, Azure and AWS. The platform orchestrates the sharing of data between any data lake or warehouse using the protocols native to each platform – all without the pain and complexity of multi-cloud management. Jake Graham, Co-Founder and CEO of Bobsled, saw the power of data sharing technologies while at Microsoft Azure where he led the development of its data sharing product; but recognized the need for infrastructure that spanned beyond the walls of each platform.
“Data sharing dramatically reduces the time data teams need to use external datasets, and in doing so, unlocks the ability for sources of data to scale their data business in unprecedented ways,” said Jake Graham, Co-Founder and CEO of Bobsled. “Bobsled allows companies with valuable analytical data to capitalize on the power of data sharing without becoming an expert in every platform used by their customers. The as-a-service revolution is coming to data, and we’re excited to lead the way.”
Data-centric companies are already capitalizing on the opportunity. Data providers like ZoomInfo, LinkUp, and CoreLogic are investing heavily in building data-as-a-service offerings, which aim to bring the same frictionless experience pioneered in software to data through technologies like data sharing. Additionally, SaaS companies like Stripe and Heap, which traditionally only made their data available through analytics dashboards and APIs, have grown significant new lines of business by delivering the data that customers generate in their applications into platforms like Snowflake and Databricks that most companies use for analysis.
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“Enterprises operate in a multi-cloud, multi-platform world, and the ecosystem of data products inside these companies has scaled magnificently. It is unrealistic for data professionals to build, maintain, and support external data delivery that is needed to drive their internal products across a multitude of platform providers.” said Brentt Baltimore, Principal at Greycroft. “Companies need technology that helps them capitalize on the power of the data platforms in a frictionless way, by delivering the data to the place that they work.”
As data becomes an increasingly important part of the modern business, investors see similarities with software a decade ago. “The data market feels very similar to the early days of SaaS where companies were on a single cloud and forced their customers to join them there,” said Bobsled Board Member and 406 Ventures Partner Graham Brooks. “We believe that over the next few years the data business will follow the same path as software and meet their customers where they work. Bobsled will make that possible.”
Customer Quotes for Use:
- “Cross-cloud data sharing ensures seamless and secure data transfers between unique environments,” said Jon Durkee, COO at TrueData. “Bobsled has built a powerful solution that allows our clients to easily ingest TrueData’s deterministic datasets into their native data environment. We’ve already noticed how this integration has reduced the time it takes to deliver data, freeing up engineering resources to focus their time on product innovation and improving business outcomes for our clients.”
- Companies like LinkUp, a leading jobs data provider, are already seeing transformational value using Bobsled. “It used to take us 1-2 days to get our customers up-and-running on our datasets,” said Toby Dayton, CEO of LinkUp. “With Bobsled, we can get a customer working on an analytics-ready dataset in the platform of their choice within 1-2 hours. Using Bobsled has helped reduce the sales cycle by enabling us to provide our data in the client’s data platform of choice.”
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