Serverless streaming database platform startup DeltaStream emerged from stealth today armed with $10 million from a seed funding round led by New Enterprise Associates.

The company has built a serverless streaming database that’s designed to help manage, secure and process data streams. The “serverless” aspect refers to the way the platform abstracts away the underlying infrastructure, so developers can interact with the platform without tinkering with computer servers.

DeltaStream is in the real-time data crunching game, an area of vital importance to enterprises today. It’s real-time data that enables companies to deliver instantaneous product recommendations as someone is strolling through a shopping mall, for example. It also enables financial institutions to spot and block fraudulent transactions the moment they’re attempted.

Most enterprises rely on cloud-based data streaming platforms such as Apache Kafka or Amazon Kinesis to power such applications. Those platforms continuously capture reams of live data that’s streaming in from hundreds or even thousands of different sources. It’s this data that helps to power real-time applications that can process and react to happenings with minimal latency.

Implementing all that real-time data streaming is a huge struggle for all but the most capable businesses. It requires a team of developers that knows its way around distributed systems and possesses data management skills. At the same time, this team needs to work around the clock and provision servers and clusters to ensure delivery guarantees, fault tolerance and elasticity. The same team must also keep the entire system ticking over 24 hours a day.

DeltaStream says doing all of this is a huge burden for developer teams. Its serverless database is designed to manage, secure and process all of the data streams it ingests. In essence, it provides a compute layer atop of streaming storage systems such as Kafka and Kinesis. With DeltaStream, it becomes possible to read data from one or more services, perform computations and analysis on that information, then write the results across different storage sources in real-time.

DeltaStream founder and Chief Executive Hojjat Jafarpour told VentureBeat that his company’s platform makes it simple to create real-time streaming applications and pipelines in the familiar Structured Query Language. “The solution is serverless, meaning users just need to focus on building their applications and pipelines,” he said. “DeltaStream takes care of running them, complete with scaling up and down, fault tolerance and isolation.”

The main benefit is that developers can just get on with their work, safe in the knowledge that the resources required to power their applications are there. In addition, the simplicity of SQL makes it easier to manage, secure and query data in motion. Finally, DeltaStream also organizes data streams into schemas and databases, and provides role-based access control to ensure the privacy of the information that streams through it.

DeltaStream’s provision of the compute layer on top of users’ streaming storage systems, the company said in a blog post, eliminates the need for data duplication and doesn’t add unnecessary latency to real-time applications and pipelines.

DeltaStream said its platform is available in private beta on Amazon Web Services starting today. The company will use the funds from today’s round to build out the features of its platform and expand to Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure before it becomes generally available.

Image: DeltaStream