Onehouse is building a neutral data lake integration layer on top of Apache Hudi • TechCrunch

Onehouse emerged last year with a cloud data lake product built on top of the open source Apache Hudi project. The startup wants to act as an integration layer to move data between different repositories, rather than competing directly with larger data lake vendors like Snowflake and Databricks.

Today the company announced a $25 million Series A.

Company founder and CEO Vinoth Chandar came up with the idea for Hudi while he was an engineer at Uber in 2016, and eventually decided to start a company based on the open source project. He says that today his idea is to be a neutral, complementary layer between these other data lake products and interoperate with multiple formats, whatever they may be.

“Our thesis is that we live in a multi-engine world where there are many, many engines that are going to evolve and sit on top of the same data. We want to help organizations avoid migrating every time there is a new engine,” Chandar told TechCrunch.

The open source project has been gaining traction with 2,200 pull requests on GitHub last year and more than 600 engaged users on the GitHub platform, according to the company.

Some percentage of those open source users will eventually want to move to the managed cloud service, and the company is working with paying customers today in production. For now, though, product head Kyle Weller says the cloud product remains in preview mode to keep the number of paying customers at a manageable level.

“We’re still in a preview mode where we want to throttle how many people come in the door while we build up and train our full global support team and some of these other building blocks and pieces,” Weller explained.

With the new cash, the company has been able to double the team, growing from 15 at the time of last year’s seed announcement to 30 today. The startup has been mostly focused on hiring engineering talent to this point, but Chandar says that the emphasis is changing. “We hired more on the product and engineering side in the last year, but given the current stage of our business, we will focus a lot more on hiring and expanding our go-to market team,” he said.

The $25 million Series A closed in the second half of last year, and was co-led by Addition and Greylock, the same firms that co-led the seed round. The new money brings the total raised to $33 million.