Crate.io Announces $11M Series A Round

Crate.io, developer of CrateDB, a leading open source SQL database for real-time machine data and IoT applications, today announced $11 million in series A funding, along with the commercially-available Crate Machine Data Platform and version 3.0 of the open source CrateDB. The new funding was led by Zetta Venture Partners and Deutsche Invest Equity with participation from Mike Chalfen, Momenta Partners and Charlie Songhurst. Existing investors Draper Esprit, Vito Ventures and Solomon Hykes also participated in the round, which will be used to accelerate development and adoption of both the commercial and open source offerings.

"We are extremely pleased to have achieved several critical fiscal and technical milestones today, all of which reflect our steadfast commitment to meet the needs of our customers as they move into the next generation of machine data," said Christian Lutz, CEO of Crate.io. "I would like to thank Zetta Venture Partners, Deutsche Invest Equity and our other investors, whose funding is being used to expand the capabilities of CrateDB well beyond its roots. The introduction of the Crate Machine Data Platform and the innovations in CrateDB 3.0 truly move us up the stack to enterprise actionability, making us a critical component of their data infrastructure and positioning us well for the future."

"This space has been crying out for someone to create something consumable that allows machine data to be gathered and actually used, without having to cobble together lots of different data management infrastructure software to do it," said Roy Illsley, principal analyst at Ovum. "The Crate.io Machine Data Platform gives users the ability to take action on the data they gather to achieve measurable business outcomes, without having to master a host of cloud-native technologies to build and operate it."

Introducing the Crate Machine Data Platform

Progressive companies are racing to build new systems that harness data generated by internet-connected factories, vehicles and smart buildings and put it to work immediately. These systems ingest streams of sensor data, analyze it and then trigger alerts or actions in order to optimize the behavior of "things." They can change factory machine settings to improve output, direct failing vehicles off the road to increase safety, or disable access credentials to reduce fraud.

Based on its years of experience working with machine data innovators, Crate.io is introducing the Crate Machine Data Platform. The Crate Machine Data Platform helps companies put machine data to work even faster, by simplifying the time-consuming job of building and operating the data management "plumbing" that forms the foundation for IoT systems. It gives commercial IoT platform companies and enterprises major advantages by eliminating the time and cost required to build data infrastructure from the ground up. The platform is a cloud-native stack available as a fully-managed offering on Microsoft Azure, or as an on-premises solution.

ALPLA, Inc., a leading global manufacturer of plastic packaging products for Coca Cola, Unilever and other brands, uses the new platform to continuously improve its overall factory equipment effectiveness (OEE). Data from tens of thousands of sensors, with 900 different types in each of its factories, is fed into the Crate Machine Data Platform and used to inform a central mission control room overseeing production performance across all the factories. With this insight, ALPLA can identify developing issues and immediately support machine operators remotely.

"We are running visual inspection systems in about every line of our plants. Having people constantly monitor these systems on the factory floor and react to any error is almost impossible," said Jodok Schaeffler, General Manager of ALPLA. "By using the Crate Machine Data Platform to collect and analyze sensor data from all our factory equipment in real time, we can actually direct people on the floor to the 'hot spots' and, with that, improve the waste rate and efficiency of production."

Crate Machine Data Platform functionality includes:

High velocity data loading — Scalable service ingests millions of SQL, JSON and MQTT data points per minute into the platform with any data structure, even complex JSON objects with nested objects and arrays.

Data enrichment — As raw data streams into the platform, user-defined logic is executed to convert it (within milliseconds) into a clean, consistent, analytic data set enriched with computed values, aggregates and views.

Real-time data analysis — Postgres-compatible SQL syntax supports real-time time series, location, text search and user-defined machine learning analyses.

Data visualization — Grafana, Klimt, or any other user-specified data visualization software can be hosted and scaled within the platform.

Operational triggers and alerting — User-defined rules trigger workflows and alerts that can improve operational efficiency in the moment.

Data platform administration

Platform scaling and orchestration — The Crate Machine Data Platform is based on a cloud-native microservices architecture, managed and secured via a Kubernetes environment.

Data aging and archiving — As data ages and loses relevance (especially in real-time systems), the platform can automatically archive data in inexpensive cold storage. This data can be easily restored in order to perform new analyses of historic data.

Data backup and restore — Incremental database backups are automatically archived.

Monitoring and logging — All access to the platform is logged and can be monitored in real time.

Data security — Role-based access control is provided by the platform and all access from within and without is encrypted and authenticated.
CrateDB 3.0

CrateDB is as an open source SQL database for real-time processing of IoT and machine data such as manufacturing sensor data, logs, messages and device-generated GPS data. CrateDB makes machine data applications that were previously only possible using NoSQL solutions available to mainstream SQL developers. It is designed to scale query throughput of complex data structures linearly with cluster size, making capacity both more predictable and affordable than other solutions.

CrateDB 3.0, introduced today, includes the following enhancements:

-Enhanced security features including user administration and role-based access control
-Up to 100x faster query performance via hash joins, HyperLogLog and other new algorithms
-Support for virtual tables (SQL VIEWs) and sub-queries with Update and Delete statements
-Shard Visualizer to make database administration easier

The Crate Machine Data Platform and CrateDB 3.0 are available immediately. For more information on both, please visit https://crate.io/products/.

Investor Quotes

"Crate allows companies to see their operations in high resolution with the best time series storage and analytics solutions in the market," said Ash Fontana at Zetta. "Crate strikes the right balance between scalability, flexibility and SQL compliance to fill a very real need for large industrial and technology companies with lots of machine-generated data. The Crate team solved very tough technical problems to strike this balance and we're proud to support them as they go to market."

"We found Crate's solution to be the digitization engine for industrial projects," said Torsten Kreindl, Managing Partner of DIVC Deutsche Invest Venture Capital. "The capability for real-time processing of machine data is a key constraint in many Industry 4.0 endeavors that Crate has successfully solved for key industrial clients."

"I love partnering with teams combining grit and genius," said Mike Chalfen, who invested in a personal capacity. "I look for products that can take a strategic position in an important market. I'm excited to back Crate to make it the foundation for the most advanced industry 4.0 projects and platforms."

About Crate.io

Crate.io develops data management solutions that help companies put IoT and machine data to work. CrateDB is an open source distributed database offering the scalability and performance of NoSQL with the power and ease of standard SQL. The Crate.io Machine Data Platform is a turnkey data layer, offered as a hosted cloud service, enabling faster development of IoT platforms and data-driven smart factories. Crate.io is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Berlin, New York City, and Dornbirn, Austria.