Cloud data warehouse startup Firebolt Analytics Inc. hit unicorn status with a $1.4 billion valuation today after closing on a $100 million round of funding.

The Series C round, which brings Firebolt’s total amount raised to $269 million, comes just 15 months after the company exited stealth mode. Alkeon Capital led today’s raise, together with participation from Sozo Ventures, Glynn Capitaland existing investors Zeev Ventures, Angular Ventures, Dawn Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and K5 Global.

Today’s round follows a $127 million fund raise in June and does a lot to validate Firebolt’s claim that its cloud data warehouse is up to 100 times faster than rival products.

Those rivals include the likes of Snowflake Inc., the most prominent cloud data warehouse player, as well as traditional on-premises data warehouses and public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google LLC.

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 economical and practical to analyze more data.

Another advantage of the Firebolt platform is that, according to the company, 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.

Firebolt said today’s round will help it to chase a bigger share of a market that’s expected to be worth as much as $65 billion a year by 2025, with vast digitization trends across industries expected to drive huge demand for data analytics.

Firebolt didn’t offer any concrete numbers on how much it has grown so far, but said its business has “gained strong traction” with many of the world’s fastest-growing tech companies. It said many of its customers are data application builders and that it supplies them with the infrastructure they need to ensure agility and support future growth.

Firebolt co-founder and Chief Executive Eldad Farkash (pictured, right, with Chief Operating Officer Saar Bitner) said data is at the core of every modern application today, meaning software engineers are by extension becoming data engineers too.

“We see the role of the data warehouse as the foundation on top of which companies build all kinds of analytics experiences,” Farkash said. “Firebolt’s purpose is to push the boundaries of what can be done with analytics, and allow companies to leverage data into previously unreachable territories.”

Alongside today’s funding, Firebolt announced the hiring of former Google BigQuery principal engineer Mosha Pasumansky as its new chief technology officer. He’s just the latest in a string of new hires, with Firebolt almost doubling its staff count in the last six months.

Looking ahead, Firebolt said today’s funding will allow it to capitalize on the growing demand from tech companies for more interactive analytics experiences with their big data. The money will also be used to expand its product and engineering teams, Firebolt said.

Photo: Firebolt