Upsolver announces $13M Series A led by Vertex Ventures US to ease management of cloud data lakes by allowing users to query the data using SQL
Ron Miller / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Upsolver's $13M Series A lands in a busy lane of cloud-data tooling finance: SnapLogic's earlier $40M Series F showed integration platforms raising late-stage money, while AtScale's $50M Series D signaled investor appetite for moving big datasets into BI tools. The bet here is that data lakes stay cheap storage but need a friendlier query layer.
The thesis got early validation: less than a year later Upsolver raised its $25M Series B after reporting revenue tripled in 2020, making this round the entry point of one of the faster follow-ons in the category.
First-order effects
- Vertex Ventures US's capital lets Upsolver push its SQL-querying layer beyond early adopters, directly targeting teams that found raw data-lake tooling too engineering-heavy.
Second-order effects
- Rivals attacking adjacent layers of the stack — Hex's notebook-style analytics with Snowflake and BigQuery integrations and Treeverse's Git-like version control for data lakes — now compete with Upsolver for the same 'make lakes usable' budget.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, cloud data lakes evolve from raw storage into SQL-queryable analytics platforms, pressuring warehouse-first vendors and consolidating tooling spend around whoever owns the query interface.
The trend: Cloud data infrastructure is layering familiar SQL interfaces over cheap object storage, drawing successive venture rounds into the space between data lakes and warehouses.