Data analytics specialist Dremio Corp. is now valued at $2 billion, double what it was worth a year ago, after raising $160 million in new funding.

Dremio said in its announcement of the Series E funding round today that Adams Street Partners led the investment. StepStone Group and DTCP participated as well. The three firms were joined by several returning investors including Sapphire Ventures, which led Dremio’s previous funding round. 

Santa Clara, California-based Dremio provides a software platform that it describes as a SQL lakehouse engine. The software enables companies to use data they store on platforms such as Amazon S3 to create business intelligence dashboards and run analyses. Dremio says that it has solved several of the challenges historically associated with business intelligence tasks.

One challenge that Dremio addresses for its customers relates to data movement. To analyze records stored in a service such as S3, companies often have to move them to a separate system, usually a data warehouse. The process of moving information to a different system can be highly complicated when a large amount of data is involved, which slows down business intelligence projects.

Dremio’s lakehouse platform allows companies to turn their data into dashboards without moving it. The  platform runs directly on services such as S3, removing the need to send records to an external system.

A second, related challenge that Dremio’s platform tackles is data sprawl. If three business units plan to use a certain set of records, they might create three separate copies of the records and store them in different systems. Creating multiple versions of the same information increases a company’s data storage costs. It also makes tasks such as enforcing cybersecurity rules more complicated.

Dremio’s platform removes the need for multiple data copies, according to the startup. A company working on three analytics projects doesn’t have to create a separate data copy for each project, the startup says, but can instead use a single dataset across all three projects.

Business intelligence teams can analyze data they store in Dremio’s platform using SQL queries. The startup has developed an array of features to speed up SQL queries and help users generate insights from data faster.

Dremio’s platform includes a component called a cost-based optimizer that automatically finds the fastest way to run a query. The results of frequently performed queries are stored so that, the next time they’re needed, the platform can retrieve them instantly. That avoids the delay of calculating results from scratch every time.

Dremio uses a technology called Gandiva to increase the efficiency with which queries are carried out. Gandiva is a customized version of an open-source compiler that developers in Apple Inc.’s ecosystem used to turn their code files into apps. According to Dremio, the compiler is especially useful for speeding up complex queries that carry out multiple data operations. 

“The market momentum towards cloud data lakes is now irrefutable,” said Dremio Chief Executive Officer Billy Bosworth. “The only question left is how quickly customers can take advantage of these modern open data architectures. Our solutions allow you to run lightning fast queries directly on your data lake.”

Dremio has maintained an annual revenue growth rate of more than 200% over the last few years, the startup disclosed today on occasion of its latest funding round, though it didn’t provide absolute numbers. Dremio counts big names such as Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., General Motors Co. and Nutanix Inc. as customers.

Dremio will reportedly use the funds to grow its engineering and sales divisions, as well as expand its presence in international markets.

Tomer Shiran, Dremio’s co-founder and chief technology officer, recently spoke to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s video studio, about how the company believes open data architectures such as lakehouses will start to replace data warehouses this year:

Image: Dremio