Meltano emerged from GitLab as an ELT (extract, load and transform) platform which has evolved into a full-blown DataOps platform infrastructure. The company has announced version 2.0 of the platform which comes with a load of new features. Meltano also raised an additional $8.2 million in funding, bringing total funding in the company to $12.4 million.

“Up to this point, we’ve been focused mostly on bringing these software development best practices to the first step in the data life cycle – extract, load, and transform,” says Douwe Maan, Founder and CEO, Meltano. “With 2.0, we are bringing these same DataOps operating system qualities to capabilities in the data life cycle beyond ENL, thereby allowing people to go from having nothing to having a full, modern data stack up and running on their local machine in a matter of hours, not days.”

Version 2.0 also allows DataOps teams to verify the impact of all of their changes locally, without risking putting your production environment into a broken state.

Check out the discussion around the new release and new funding round in the video above.

Here are some highlights from the show:

• A quick introduction to Meltano
• New features of 2.0 release
• What role is Meltano playing in the modern cloud-centric world
• What kind of adoption is there for Meltano
• Areas of investment with additional $8.2 million in seed funding
• Why is Meltano moving away from GitLab to GitHub

Solutions:

• Get Started with Meltano
• What’s new in Meltano 2.0
• Check out Meltano ELT

Connect with Douwe Maan (Twitter)

Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi. This is your host Swapnil Bhartiya, and welcome to another episode of TFiR Let’s Talk. And today, we have with us Douwe Maan, founder and CEO of Meltano. Douwe, it’s great to have you on the show.

Douwe Maan: Thanks for having me.

Swapnil Bhartiya: If I’m not wrong, Meltano came out of GitLabs. Almost been a year now. It’s an open source ELT, extract, load, and transform platform. But a lot of things have changed as you are announcing a new version. And we also have some news about the seed funding round. But before we get into all those details, I would love to hear from you, just tell us quickly, what is Meltano all about today?

Douwe Maan: Great question. So as you described, Meltano startups being focused on extract, load, and transform. But specifically, compared to other tools in this space, we bring software development best practices, such as version control, code review, and end to end testing to your data pipeline work so that you can deploy your pipelines with more confidence and collaborate on them more effectively. And beyond ELT, as you said, we have the 2.0 release coming up next week on June 8th. We are bringing these qualities to every aspect of the data life cycle beyond ELT by adding support for data validation and quality with great expectations. And Superset for analysis, with Meltano allowing you to bring these tools as well as singer and DBT for ELT together in one place. And allowing you to trace your data platform like a software project instead of simply a bunch of standalone tools living in their own little worlds.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. You answer a lot of questions there, but I’ll just go a bit deeper into Meltano. And if you look at today’s cloud native, cloud centric world, what role is Meltano playing there?

Douwe Maan: Yeah. So today, when you set up a data platform for your organization, you end up picking a data warehouse. Snowflake is a really popular option. You end up picking maybe a couple of SaaS solutions for various steps in the life cycle, like extract and load. And then you might self manage something like airflow for workflow orchestration. And that means that you end up with a stack of tools that is pretty disparate, different tools, different user interfaces. You need to manually make sure that they’re all sort of in agreement when it comes to configuration. And with Meltano, we allow teams to take control of this complexity and this fragility by giving you all of these advantages that software development teams have used to collaboratively and rapidly, iteratively build better products that they and their organizations can rely on. And within this world where there’s a tool to do everything, Meltano allows these different tools to come together and be better in the sum of their parts.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. Now you did touch upon version 2.0, but you touched upon how it goes beyond the initial goal. Just talk a little bit going a bit in detail about the new features, functionalities, and how it actually improves not only I would say experience for data teams, but also makes them more productive.

Douwe Maan: Yeah, absolutely. So up to this point, as we’ve mentioned, we’ve been focused mostly on bringing these software development best practices to the first step in the data life cycle. Extract, load, and transform. And we have shown that by bringing in existing open source tools to technologies like singer and DBT, you can allow people to build something more than they could without the framework that Meltano provides. So with 2.0, we are bringing these same data ops operating system qualities to capabilities in the data life cycle beyond ENL, like quality and analysis, thereby allowing people to go from having nothing to having a full, modern data stack up and running on their local machine in a matter of hours, not days. And building it in such a way that you can verify the impact of all of your changes locally, without risking putting your production environment into a broken state.

Douwe Maan: And it’s Meltano 2.0, which specifically adds support for Superset, one of these analysis tools. And that generally starts shaping Meltano and the hub of supportive components and plugins to be more of a place to discover best in class data sources and data tools than just a place to find connectors for sources and destinations from our ELT history. The Meltano hub is now a place to discover any data tool that can be run on top of Meltano and be fit into your data platform in a consistent way with consistent configuration installation, deployment, et cetera, to make it easier than ever for teams to go from nothing to having a modern data stack that they’re actually confident deploying into production.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you also talk about what kind of adoption you’re seeing? And if you can, without naming any, or if you can name it’s up to you, use cases is where’s been used?

Douwe Maan: Yeah. So we have a Slack community right now, which is where our community comes together to help each other and to talk about the future of both Meltano itself and the data space, which counts more than 2,500 people across more than a thousand different organizations. With companies such as Zapier, Remote.com, Netlify, GitLab, and many others represented in this group. And the use cases are mostly medium-sized organizations today that are using Meltano to build their data platform more, just with higher confidence in the result of their work, really. And in some cases, also to only run EL pipelines with data sources that are not supported by some of the bigger SaaS data transformation and integration tools like Fivetran. With Meltano and its library of more than 300 different singer connectors, the number of sources and destinations that you can connect or build your own connector for is essentially limitless compared to some of these other solutions.

Swapnil Bhartiya: One more thing is, which is interesting, is that of course it emerged from GitLab. But what kind of relationship you also have with GitHub, because you, as you’re growing, you’re kind of moving a bit towards GitHub as well. So what is the reason, what is the driver behind that, and how do you look at it?

Douwe Maan: Yeah, great question. So Meltano, the project was founded inside GitLab, which builds a competing product to GitHub. Also, for allowing software development teams to collaborate more effectively. So since Meltano came from there, our open source projects had always been hosted on GitLab.com, which is where GitLab build all of their stuff. But now that we are trying to reach a larger audience and lower the contribution barrier, it is more important for us to be on GitHub where all of these other data communities are and where a lot of open source developers already have their accounts, than to be on GitLab, which has a lot of really amazing functionality we’ve got them used to but doesn’t quite have that network effect that GitHub does. So to keep growing the community and to allow more effective collaboration with some of these other open source data product communities, we are moving to GitHub with the announcement of the 2.0 release.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Perfect. Now, one more thing which we now want to talk about is the additional 8.2 million in seed loan funding. Talk a bit about, first of all, who are the investors behind Meltano? Second would be that, what is the total funding that you have raised so far? And third would be that, what are the areas where you’re looking for growth?

Douwe Maan: Yeah. So last year, we spun out of GitLab. We raised funding from GV, formerly known as Google Ventures, who along with a number of angel investors, put in $4.2 million based on our vision to bring software development best practices to ELMT. And then this year, very recently, we raised an additional $8.2 million from Venrock and another number of angel investors around this data ops operating system vision of bringing software development best practices to the entire data life cycle and all of these different components that make up the data platform. So in total, we have raised $12.4 million so far, and this amount of money allows us to build out this vision and also set up a managed hosting offering in the second half of this year for all of those teams that are comfortable building their data platform with a Git repository and [inaudible 00:08:38] interface, but that do not want to be themselves responsible for deploying this into production and managing that production deployment.

Douwe Maan: It’s these customers or users today that will be served by our managed hosting offering, which also allows us to start focusing on the commercialization beyond just the open source product. But we are an open core business, meaning that the open source technology is really crucial to our success, and so is the community. And we are excited to be able to serve a larger audience by lowering the barrier to actually taking Meltano into the production.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Thanks for sharing that. Now, if I ask you that your folks are related with you, actually, when you look at cloud native world, a cloud centric world. Every technology companies are relatively new. But what is your long term goal? What is your long term vision? Or what are the things that are in your either roadmap or pipeline, or when you look at the future that you’re like, “Hey, this is where, which is our ultimate goal?”

Douwe Maan: Yeah. So the mission that we have set for ourselves is to enable everyone to realize the full potential of their data. And we think that we are building towards this mission with our vision of Meltano becoming the foundation for every team’s ideal data stack. Since a lot of companies have different needs, the components that make up their data stack will look different as well. But all of these organizations have a need for something that brings them together and allows their teams to collaborate on this different combination of components in a consistent and reliable and stable way. And that’s where Meltano comes in. So in the short term, we have proven out this vision with end to end support all the way from singer and DBT for ELT to Superset for BI. But we will continue to add support in Meltano for additional capabilities of the data platform, including data cataloging tools, observability metric layers in order for Meltano to become the first ingredient to any modern data stack, essentially.

Douwe Maan: And over the long term, anything we think will allow more and more different types of organizations to make the most of their data is in scope for us to build. And that starts with really great open core technology for building data platforms out of components, and this managed solution that will allow organizations to deploy this without that additional headache. And for larger enterprises to connect this to all of their existing infrastructure, like single sign on, et cetera. And to be clear, everyone is in our mission to allow everyone to realize the full potential of their data very much because of this community focus we have, where it’s incredibly important to us that most of the value of Meltano can be gotten from the free open core product. And we are extremely happy to see people in all kinds of different markets and regions in the world benefiting from this high quality data pooling that previously would not have been available to a lot of the world, and a lot of the regions that we see a lot of are successful and enthusiastic users.

Swapnil Bhartiya: DouweDowe, thank you so much for taking time out today.

Douwe Maan: Thank you.

Swapnil Bhartiya: And of course, talk about the new release. Of course, the seed funding around all the share. The kind of broader vision that you folks are. Thanks for those insights. And I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you.

Douwe Maan: Awesome. Thank you so much. Have a nice day.

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