September 25, 2023

Independent Storage

As the industry rearranges around universal storage, one of the biggest imperatives for delivering modular components is to ensure that storage remains neutral.

Storage and compute have been inseparable since the beginning of time — at least Unix time — and this has always shaped how analytic databases are designed and sold: with storage and compute as a monolithic product. Moving data is required even to test an alternative product. And migrations to a new product are long, disruptive, and risky. This is the source of lock-in.

To established vendors, this natural lock-in is a feature, not a bug. It’s a cornerstone of the business model that has dominated the industry for decades; let’s call this the Oracle Trap. As you’d expect, now that adoption of open storage standards seems inevitable, there is a race by the major players to control it and cling to their advantage.

The Case for Independent Storage, Tabular

Funding

OpenVolt, creator of an API that developers can use to access smart meter data in Europe, raised €1.5m in pre-Seed funding.

Tabular, a cloud-native warehouse and automation platform built on top of Apache Iceberg tables and cloud object storage, raised $26m in Series B funding.

Motherduck, a collaborative serverless analytics platform based on DuckDB, a free and open source in-process OLAP database, raised $52.5m in Series B funding.

Mapbox, provider of AI-powered location technology for automakers, mobile app developers, and logistics services, raised $280m in Series E funding.