Data warehouse startup Yellowbrick Data lands $75M in Series C1 funding

Data warehouse technology player Yellowbrick Data Inc. has restocked its war chest after closing on a $75 million Series C1 round of funding today that brings its total amount raised to $248 million.

The company said today’s round added three new investors, including the institutional investor Citadel Securities. The other two investors were not named, but Yellowbrick said existing backers Third Point Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Next47, DFJ Growth, Threshold Ventures, GV and IVP all participated in the round.

Yellowbrick’s backers are betting on its hybrid cloud data warehouse and disaster recovery technology. The company sells a cloud-based data warehouse complete with services based on its massively parallel processing analytic database. The platform can run on a customers’ on-premises infrastructure, in the public cloud or in both environments at the same time, storing petabytes of information. The startup says that the platform is capable of running some queries 100 times faster than its competitors, which include the likes of Snowflake Inc. and Google LLC’s BigQuery cloud service.

The company’s biggest value proposition, though, is its predictable pricing and low cost, with Yellowbrick saying on its website it can guarantee enterprises savings of at least 50% if they switch to its data warehouse from Snowflake. Last year, the company introduced a lower-priced subscription tier starting at just $10,000 per month providing access to all of the key features in its platform with a 10-terabyte data limit per deployment.

By positioning itself at a much lower price point, Yellowbrick has managed to carve out a niche for itself among smaller companies that require advanced data warehouse features but do not need to store petabytes of information.

“Time and time again, customers are telling us that they can no longer tolerate the unbounded expense of consumption-based billing, especially vendors that force advanced purchase of ‘credits’ like Snowflake,” Yellowbrick Chief Executive Neil Carson said today. “Customers much prefer our modern Kubernetes-based, truly cloud-native architecture, which allows a choice of pricing models.”

The proof is in the pudding of course, and Yellowbrick wouldn’t provide any concrete numbers, instead claiming “accelerated sales” of its platform and that it is on track to more than double its year-end recurring revenue with this year’s bookings. It also claimed to have recently added multiple “large companies” to its customer base, including financial services firms, hedge funds, insurance companies and more.

Enterprises may be more inclined to believe Yellowbrick’s new backer Citadel, which also happens to be a content customer that chose to invest in the company after seeing its data warehouse in action.

“We believe Yellowbrick’s data warehouse technology leaps ahead of anything on the market after seeing firsthand what it can do for our analytics,” said Josh Woods, Citadel’s head of options, ETF, CES and research technology. “We’re thrilled to invest in what will be the new standard in data warehousing and analytics.”

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