Guests: Dipti Borkar, Steven Mih
Show: Let’s Talk

[su_note note_color=”#000″ text_color=”#fff”]About the company: Ahana, the Presto company, offers the only managed service for Presto on AWS with the vision to simplify open data lake analytics. Presto, the open source project created by Facebook and used at Uber, Twitter and thousands more, is the de facto standard for fast SQL processing on data lakes. Ahana Cloud delivers the easiest Presto SaaS and enables data platform teams to provide high-performance SQL analytics on their S3 data lakes and other data sources.[/su_note]

Ahana has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Third Point, which is a very large hedge and venture firm. Ahana received its seed investment from GV (formerly Google Ventures).

As to how Ahana plans in investing their new funding, Steven Mih, Co-Founder & CEO of Ahana, says, “There are three areas: First, we’re going to continue to scale our technical, product, and engineering teams to continue to innovate on the Presto project and the Open Data Lake analytics solution, making it even easier to build as well as to operate.” The second area that will benefit from the funding, according to Mih, is around the community, which includes companies like Facebook, Intel, and Uber. “Finally, the funding will also go toward marketing efforts to drive the business side and continue to grow our customers,” he says.

This is a timely investment as the market for the data lake is experiencing skyrocketing levels of growth. According to Dipti Borkar, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Ahana, “As the amount of data in data lakes like Amazon S3 continues to grow, the amount of compute that’s needed will grow as well. And that’s what makes it such a big market.” She continues, “It’s this combination of cloud data and open source that’s making big companies confluent.”

Data lake is a relatively busy space and Ahana is competing against the likes of Dremio “that offer a proprietary system that does some analytics on data lakes as well,” said Mih. This round of funding will give Ahana the needed resources to strengthen its position in the market.

Unlike many other competitors, Ahana is solely focused on the cloud. “There are a lot of companies out there that are trying to do both on-prem and cloud. Most companies failed to succeed there as these are two different products and it’s very hard to build to support both these areas,” said Borkar. “That’s where Snowflake and Databricks are doing it right and that’s the approach we are taking. We are singularly focused on the cloud, today on AWS, overtime on other clouds. We want to build the best experience that’s cloud native for SQL on data lakes, versus some of the other competitors like Dremio, who are trying to do it everywhere. That’s a hard thing to do.”

Video Summary was written by Jack Wallen