The pandemic has prompted countless companies to migrate to the cloud. By 2025, driven in part by the need for digital services, 85% of enterprises will be cloud-first, according to to Gartner. But the transition is not always easy. In a recent MuleSoft questionnaire84% of organizations said data and app integration challenges were a barrier to their digital transformations and, by extension, their adoption of cloud platforms.
Urged to meet the need, software engineer Nir founded Livneh Equalum, a startup that provides software that integrates with existing infrastructure to process and transform data, including streaming data. Equalum can collect, transform and sync data, moving data from devices and apps to AI systems in real time or in batches, data lakes and data warehouses.
Prior to co-founding Equalum, Livneh was a full-stack developer in the US military and led the product management team at Quest Software (which was acquired by Dell in 2012). He also co-founded SET Systems, an IT consultancy focused on data analytics.
“Over the years, Livneh saw that many organizations struggled to manage their data integration needs. The work was done manually by different tools, which made the environment much more complex, and in most cases the data transferred was based on historical data rather than real-time data,” Guy Eilon, CEO of Equalum, told businesskinda.com in a statement. Eilon was previously the VP of Sales at cybersecurity firm Cynet.”[Livneh founded Equalum] to bring simplicity to the data integration market and to… enable organizations to make decisions based on real-time data rather than historical and inaccurate data.”
Equalum manages data pipelines and uses open source packages, including Apache Spark and Kafka, to stream and batch data processes. The platform allows to create “logic” of the data pipeline using a drag-and-drop interface, including triggers that modify data at source, perform calculations on data, correlate data with third-party sources and filter, lookup and enrich data.
In this way, Equalum is no different from startups like Striim and StreamSets, which provide tools to build data pipelines across cloud and hybrid cloud platforms (i.e., mixing on-premises and public cloud infrastructure). Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Azure are also selling access to some version of pipeline orchestration technology, albeit unsurprisingly focused on the cloud.
Breaking through the industry was obviously tough — Eilon declined to reveal Equalum’s revenue stats or the size of the startup’s customer base, and Equalum has no plans to hire anyone this year. But he emphasized the profitability of the opportunity. quote data from Fortune Business Insights, Eilon expects the data integration solutions market to be worth $29.16 billion by 2029 – up from $11.94 billion by 2022.
In any case, investors are confident in Equalum’s growth prospects. The company closed a $14 million Series C round today with contributions from Springtide Ventures — notably a smaller round than Equalum’s Series B, which totaled $18 million. Eilon said it’s because the board “didn’t want to thin itself out when it wasn’t necessary.”
“There is a lot of noise in the industry and we see that the biggest challenge facing customers today is that they have bought a variety of integration products for many different use cases. This creates a very complex environment,” said Eilon. “In addition, many of the tools require experienced data engineers and a lot of time to get companies to get the right value from the tool. These complex challenges, along with global resource shortages, make it much more difficult for organizations to achieve the desired outcome. Equalum’s unified platform, with our no-code UI, solves these important challenges.”
With the latest capital injection, Equalum’s total amount raised stands at $39 million.
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