Good times continue to roll in the database and analytics market.

Ahana Cloud Inc., curator of a commercial version of the Presto open-source distributed query engine, today announced a $20 million Series A funding round led by Third Point LLC, a hedge and venture firm whose other investments include data warehousing startup Yellowbrick Data Inc.

“It’s a relatively large Series A, especially in light of the fact that we’ve only been around for 15 months,” said Steven Mih, co-founder and chief executive of Ahana. The funding almost exactly mirrors the $22 million that Ahana rival Starburst Data Inc. raised in its Series A round in November 2019, an amount that has since grown to more than $160 million.

Created at Facebook Inc., Presto is best known as a high-speed, in-memory query engine that operates across data lakes comprised of both structured and unstructured data from multiple sources without requiring data to be copied or transformed. It was released to open source in 2015 and is incubated by the Presto Foundation as a project within the Linux Foundation.  Presto is used by numerous large cloud-based companies, including Netflix Inc., Microsoft Corp.’s LinkedIn subsidiary and Uber Technologies Inc.

Ahana’s business model is largely based on delivering Presto on the Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud and as a cloud-native offering it announced last fall. Currently ranked as the 27^th most popular relational database on tracking site DB-Engines, Presto’s star has been rising with the popularity of data lakes. In the past six months a new release of Presto as a Docker software container image has been downloaded 250,000 times and gained more than 330 contributors, said Dipti Borkar, Ahana’s co-founder and chief product officer.

“We see the cloud data warehousing market evolving with the data lake being the place where a lot of the analytical data is going,” Borkar said. The popularity of AWS’s S3 object storage has been a major factor, she said. “Once data is in S3 you want to use it in place,” rather than going through a lengthy extraction and transformation process.

Frothy market

Amid the current feeding frenzy for cloud startups in general and analytics startups in particular, raising money was easier than usual, Mih said. “The amount of investment that is available is phenomenal,” he said. “There are more investors in the mix and the speed with which people want to invest makes it more of an entrepreneur’s market right now.”

However, he echoed the opinion of other market watchers who have recently warned that the investment climate is beginning to resemble a bubble. “I’d say there’s more capital out there than good companies to invest in,” he said.

That doesn’t mean Ahana won’t get its fair share. The company plans to use the new funding to scale up its product engineering operation, evangelize the Presto project and grow its sales and market presence. Borkar said the founders are assuming that the market for analytical data stores will be enormous and fragmented among several large players. “We see the market as 100 times what some of the other markets are,” she said.

Also participating in the funding round were existing investors Google LLC’s GV Management Co LLC, Leslie Ventures Inc. and Lux Capital Management LLC.

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