Venture capital firm Accel Partners backs data intelligence startup e6data in $10 million Series A funding round

e6data has secured a $10 million Series A funding round as it aims to half the bill of businesses seeking to analyse their own data. This was led by Accel Partners with participation from Beenext and others. 

Data intelligence platforms allow enterprises to get insights from their own data to make business decisions and serve workloads including data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and now generative AI.

With the growing volume of data and the need to extract maximum value from it, enterprises will be looking at a sizeable bill to utilizs this data. The total addressable market (TAM) for data and AI solutions is slated to touch $230 billion in 2025, with 60% of CXOs planning to increase their spending over the next year.

Vishnu Vasanth, Co-founder and CEO, says: “This rapid increase has made data intelligence platforms the second largest IT spending category – behind only cloud spend for operational systems and application infrastructure.”

“It’s fuelling the meteoric rise of data warehouse and data lakehouse companies such as Snowflake and Databricks, and the rapid growth of corresponding offerings from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.”

“Legitimate ROI concerns stand in the way of enterprises realising the full potential of data and AI.”

“Moreover, organisations cannot freely move lakehouse table formats, data catalogues, compute providers, and cloud providers without adverse price performance impacts, the need for data movement, and cumbersome application migrations. We aim to address this through our work at e6data” adds Vasanth.

To address these challenges, e6data has developed a new breed of “compute engine” for data intelligence  platforms that helps enterprises amplify ROI on their existing platforms and architectures and escape ecosystem lock-in; all with zero friction to adoption in the form of zero data movement, zero application migration, and zero down-time. 

It plans to expand access to its Lighthouse Customer Programme, which offers the e6data solution as a managed service for the heaviest or most pressing use cases of enterprise customers, complete with production support and professional services.

Data intelligence platforms like data lakehouses and warehouses are the foundation of all analytics and AI.

At their core, they use distributed “compute engines”, whether open-source or vendor backed, for every form of  processing spanning ingestion, transformation, dashboards, reports, ML model training and inference, as well as RAG-based generative AI applications. 

However, existing compute engines are built on monolithic architectures with centralised components for most aspects of a query or job’s life cycle.

This creates challenges with respect to cost, performance, concurrency handling, and uptime - particularly on compute intensive heavy workloads that enterprises increasingly encounter as they operate at production scale. 

e6data’s founding team saw an opportunity to address these gaps with a new engine architecture and distributed processing model that is disaggregated, decentralised, and Kubernetes native.

With a multi-disciplinary mix of distributed systems engineers, database builders, open source committers, and go-to-market leaders from Microsoft, ThoughtWorks, IBM DB2, Cisco, SAP, and Thoughtworks, the e6data team’s prior experiences in over 100+ large-scale data intelligence platforms gave them a first hand view of the changing technology landscape, and the challenges facing enterprises as they scaled their data  and AI needs. 

e6data, which was founded in 2021, says it has signed up publicly listed Fortune 500 enterprises as well as high growth companies as customers.

Rajaraman Santhanam, COO at Chargebee, says: "We’ve been collaborating with e6data across several internal and external facing analytics use cases, all built on Chargebee’s multi-purpose, scalable data lakehouse platform. “

“We are seeing exciting opportunities to innovate for our customers. We have successfully supported concurrencies of over 1,000 QPS on near real-time (NRT) data and complex queries while maintaining client latencies of less than two seconds.”

“Other lakehouse engines we evaluated struggled to achieve this level of performance and scalability, despite being more resource intensive.”

2024 RTIH INNOVATION AWARDS

Data intelligence is a key focus area for the sixth edition of the RTIH Innovation Awards, which is now open for entries.

The awards, sponsored by CADS, 3D Cloud, Retail Technology Show 2025, and Business France, celebrate global tech innovation in a fast moving omnichannel world.

It’s free to enter and you can do so across multiple categories.

Key 2024 dates

Friday, 25th October: Award entry deadline 

Tuesday, 29th October: 2024 shortlist revealed

30th October-6th November: Judging days

Thursday, 21st November: Winners announced at the 2024 RTIH Innovation Awards ceremony, to be held at RIBA’s 66 Portland Place HQ in Central London.