Yellowbrick Got 44 Million in Series A Funding

Yellowbrick Data, Inc. emerged from stealth to debut its analytic solution for hybrid cloud, the cornerstone of which is the Yellowbrick data warehouse.

The company has also revealed $44 million in Series A funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, GV, Menlo Ventures, Samsung Ventures Investment Corp. and Third Point Ventures L.P.

Based on the Yellowbrick architecture for native flash queries, the company’s data warehouse is 30x smaller and up to 140x faster compared to existing solutions.

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The firm is already generating revenue, with multiple customers including Overstock.com, Inc., Symphony RetailAI and TEOCO Corporation.

“The performance we saw after one week of testing blew us away. The Yellowbrick data warehouse allows us to do things that we couldn’t do before – and at a price point that can be three to five times lower than any other competitive solution,” said Atul Jain, chairman and CEO, TEOCO. “The Yellowbrick system is so powerful; we will be able to produce insights that we could not produce before.”

Data warehousing needs a redesign: a fragmented ecosystem of solutions based on legacy architectures has hamstrung efficiency and forced businesses to compromise on how quickly and easily they can derive insights from data. big data and analytics are already an indispensable tool for enterprises; emerging fields like AI, autonomous devices and IoT will only make the ability to rapidly access current and historic data more essential. As personal technologies have gotten smaller and more powerful, how is it possible that the enterprise data warehouse continues to be such a bloated resource drain?

Introducing Yellowbrick Data Warehouse
The firm brings simplicity back to analytics and data warehousing. Designed as a turnkey appliance using the latest technologies, the data warehouse is based on the Yellowbrick architecture for native flash queries, unlocking the true speed of flash memory to power analytics in the hybrid cloud.

Features of the Yellowbrick Data Warehouse include:
• 97% size reduction: replacing six seven-foot cabinets and multiple independent systems with one 12-inch integrated appliance means less hardware to manage and better reliability. Customers will save millions in power, cooling and data center costs. “Yellowbrick will save TEOCO $5 million in data center costs over the next several years,” said Rick Mahuson, VP of R&D business analytics, TEOCO.
• Up to 140X faster: in retail fraud detection, advertising analytics, ad hoc queries and more, customers get results in minutes to queries that were once impossible using conventional solutions. “With mission critical federal programs, having the ability to load data faster, query data faster, do joins that might lead to a discovery that you wouldn’t have seen before is an actual life-saver,” said Wes Daniels, COO, Clarity Innovations, Inc., a Yellowbrick partner.
• Architecture for native flash queries: The firm engineered the entire stack to perform at the speed of memory. Replacing the spinning disk with an all memory architecture, data moves directly from flash memory to the CPU. A modular design allows customers to scale up to petabytes of data by adding analytic nodes on the fly. “With Yellowbrick, we can easily add an extra blade or two, even with the appliance running. Right-sizing hardware no longer poses a challenge,” said Atul Jain, chairman and CEO of TEOCO.
• Analytic database for modern enterprise: designed for high level of ingest and processing, customers can run mixed workloads, including ad hoc queries, large batch queries, business reports, ETL processes and OBDC inserts simultaneously without delay. “The Yellowbrick data warehouse offers Overstock a solution to the challenge of fast analytics at a reasonable cost. It is a unique combination of simple deployment with fast and scalable analytic execution,” said Don Boling, manager of business intelligence, Overstock.com.
• Hybrid cloud data warehousing: the architecture supports on-premises, private cloud, co-location, edge computing, and public cloud. The small form factor facilitates deployment virtually anywhere. “We’re expanding Yellowbrick data warehouses out to multiple customers across the globe. We think we can consolidate multiple systems onto the Yellowbrick platform,” said Nigel Pratt, SVP of technology, Symphony RetailAI.

Availability for the Yellowbrick Data Warehouse opened in September 2017.

Founded in 2014 by Neil Carson (CEO), Jim Dawson (CRO) and Mark Brinicombe (principal architect), the Yellowbrick team brings decades of experience in both databases and data warehousing hardware from companies including Fusion-io, Netezza, Google, Microsoft Server, Intel, Snowflake, IBM and Informix.