Speedy cloud data warehouse startup Firebolt Analytics Inc. is looking like a very hot prospect indeed after landing $127 million in an all-equity round of funding.

New investors Dawn Capital and K5 Global led the Series B round, with participation from angel investors and previous investors such as Zeev Ventures, TLV Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Angular Ventures, bringing Firebolt’s total amount raised to $164 million so far.

The round comes just seven months after the company’s Series A funding, appearing to validate its claims that its cloud data warehouse is 100 times faster than those of its rivals.

Firebolt is taking on more established cloud players such as Snowflake Inc. as well as traditional on-premises data warehouses, which are a combination of hardware and software that unify data from multiple sources and execute queries on it.

Firebolt’s cloud data warehouse is designed for extremely rapid analysis of large data sets. The company reckons it can provide subsecond performance for queries carried out on terabytes or even petabytes of information, thanks to its ability to crunch data up to 182 times faster than alternative data warehouse services.

The company explains that its fast performance is derived from a number of internally developed technologies that power its cloud data warehouse. They include a customized, cost-based optimizer that tweaks Structured Query Language queries its users enter to improve their speed. It also uses a technique called sparse indexing to reduce the amount of unnecessary data that queries retrieve, thereby eliminating superfluous computations.

The almost real-time query completion that Firebolt promises can be very helpful for many enterprises. Teams that work to analyze large data sets typically only query a small subset of that information because of performance constraints. By giving those teams to query their entire data sets, Firebolt can provide more accurate and detailed insights, it says. That’s because its faster performance means it becomes more economical and practical to analyze more data.

Another advantage of the Firebolt platform is that the company says it’s built specifically with developers in mind. It allows 100% programmatic control of the platform via application programming interfaces and software development kits, which makes it much easier to create rich data applications based on it, the company asserts.

Firebolt’s data warehouse is available as a software-as-a-service offering that runs on Amazon Web Services, with customers charged based on the cost of the compute, storage and networking resources they use, plus an annual subscription fee.

The similarities with company’s products and those of the better-known Snowflake have inevitably drawn comparisons between the two services, but Firebolt Chief Executive Eldad Farkash (pictured, right, alongside Chief Operating Officer Saar Bitner) told SiliconANGLE that he isn’t focused on any individual competitor. Rather, he said the company is just concentrating on solving the most challenging customer problems.

“The analytics industry has a value gap,” he said. “Data warehouses have rich capabilities and a high level of service, but they often lack the performance necessary for certain workloads. These needs are currently met by single-purpose technologies that lack the flexibility of data warehouses. We believe that Firebolt can be the data warehouse of choice for customers because we are capable of doing both.”

Farkash claims that Firebolt’s platform is fast enough and powerful enough that it will push data warehousing to evolve from internal business intelligence use cases to power a much wider range of data-intensive applications. He pointed out that new kinds of data applications are becoming more common and require a higher level of performance that is not readily available through other services.

“As data volumes grow and data usage grows, performance problems for applications intensify significantly,” Farkash said. “Even if their performance is fine for now, many companies are already looking for what’s next as they realize they’ll face performance problems as their data stores grow over time.”

The CEO explained that many of Firebolt’s customers are very “tech-forward” engineering teams that run modern data stacks, building data applications that need to provide interactive analytics.

The company claims to have made strong traction since its previous funding round. In the last six months it has doubled its employee headcount to 100 and said today it has plans to double that again in the next 12 months. It has also attracted key personnel such as Looker Data Sciences Inc. founder Keenan Rice, who will head up its U.S. operations going forward. In addition, the company spoke of “explosive growth in interest” and claimed to have added some of the world’s “most sophisticated tech companies” as customers.

It’s notable, though, that Firebolt didn’t provide any solid numbers on revenue growth or customer acquisition, but Farkash insisted the growth is real.

“Firebolt adds new customers every week, some of which are very large,” he said.”What’s even more important though is the growth we see in usage, specifically consumption of compute resources on our platform by existing customers. Once an initial use case has been successfully deployed in production, the use of Firebolt spreads within an organization to new team and use cases. That validates the value customers see in our platform.”

Looking ahead, Farkash said today’s funding will help Firebolt to capitalize on what it says is the “underserved” demand for more data-intensive applications and interactive analytics on big data.

“We intend on using the funding to continue to expand all areas of the company with a specific focus on engineering and our go-to-market team,” he said. “Another area of investment is building the integration between Firebolt and the technology partners which make up the modern data stack that our customers work with. We’re investing heavily to launch Firebolt as a fully self-service platform in 2022 to allow more customers to work with our platform.”

Image: Firebolt/Facebook