Apache Drill gurus at Dremio raise more than $10M from Redpoint and Lightspeed

Dremio, a startup founded by two former MapR employees who have developed the Apache Drill open-source project, has taken on more than $10 million in funding after just two months of operation.

The eight-person startup is working out of space furnished by two of its investors: Redpoint Ventures’ San Francisco office and Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Menlo Park office.

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It’s not exactly clear what Dremio is building, but it’s clear that the team is packed with open-source talent. Presumably Drill — an SQL query engine that can work with NoSQL databases, Hadoop file systems, and cloud storage services — will play a part. But in addition to the Drill expertise courtesy of founders Tomer Shiran and Jacques Nadeau and principal software engineer Steven Phillips, Dremio has brought on Julien Le Dem, a former Twitter engineer and coauthor of the Apache Parquet columnar data storage format.

In an interview with VentureBeat today, Shiran said he and Nadeau left MapR to start the new company because they “saw a huge opportunity.” Going forward, the startup will deliver new open-source software, Shiran said.

The story is a bit reminiscent of Confluent, a well-funded startup that spun out of LinkedIn to commercialize Apache Kafka. And Hortonworks, one of MapR’s major competitors, spun out of Yahoo and ended up going public last year.

There’s no guarantee that Dremio will grow in the same way as those companies. But Redpoint and Lightspeed have both previously invested in MapR, and now they’re bullish on Dremio. At least the startup has a bold slogan.

“Dremio will enable organizations to unlock the value of their data,” the company says on its LinkedIn page.