SQream  Technologies Ltd., the maker of a data warehouse that uses graphics cards to speed up large-sale analytics, today said it has secured $39.4 million in fresh funding.

Mangrove Capital Partners and Schusterman Family Investments jointly led the round. SQream has raised more than $50 million from investors since its founding in 2010.

The company’s SQream DB data warehouse, which launched in 2014, can store trillions of records and targets workloads such as analytics applications that need the ability to process large volumes of information quickly. The startup claim that SQream DB executes queries 60 times faster than a Hadoop-based environment in some cases. For one carrier customer, SQream boasts of reducing five-hour queries to under a minute.

SQream DB uses graphics processing units behind the scenes to improve performance. GPUs have many more cores than a central processing unit and can therefore perform more calculations at once, a quality that lends itself well to some analytics workloads. Among them are popular use cases such as business intelligence, breach detection and infrastructure monitoring that are often the focus of enterprise analytics projects, which gives SQream a sizable addressable market.

SQream DB uses GPUs not only to process queries but also to speed up data loading. That’s the phase of projects when information is imported into the analytics environment, which directly influences how fast results can be delivered further down the road. SQream says its data warehouse ingests data at a rate of up to 3 terabytes per hour for every GPU in a deployment.

Once the system imports a customer’s records, it uses machine learning to optimize them. SQream DB splits up data into “chunks” and individually compresses them, testing multiple compression algorithms on each chunk to find the one that produces the biggest efficiencies. The startup says that frees up storage space and speeds up queries.

In the interest of usability, SQream DB also packs a standard SQL interface that allows developers to interact like with a regular relational database.

SQream will use the new capital to step up product development and hire more staff. “The commitment we have received from both new and existing investors in this round, and from our customers, even during such a challenging period, is a strong validation of our vision and market potential,” SQream Chief Executive Officer Ami Gal said in a statement.

SQream competes with a number of other players in the GPU database segment. Among them is Kinetica DB Inc., which is backed by more than $50 million in venture funding from investors that include Meritech Capital Partners. 

Image: SQream Technologies