Goldman Sachs invests in open source data stack firm DataStax
CEO Chet Kapoor promises aggressive expansion.
Goldman Sachs has invested an undisclosed sum in open source data stack provider DataStax, with Goldman MD Holger Staude to join the software company's board, DataStax CEO Chet Kapoor said Thursday May 13.
(Staude, who works for GS Growth, the growth equity team within Goldman Sachs, also sits on the boards of Egnyte, deepwatch, CallMiner, and Acronys, among other companies the bank has invested in.)
Kapoor -- who was hired in 2019 from Google and who has overseen a major cultural and strategic shift at the company over the past 18 months-- described the investment in a series of tweets as "great validation of the massive market opportunity, DataStax’s approach, and our vision for the future of data."
The investment will be used to "aggressively grow our teams; scale globally; and expand Astra, Streaming, & our other offerings" he said.
Staude added in a release: “Enterprises everywhere are grappling with the challenges of managing large amounts of unstructured data. The DataStax leadership team, their open data stack, and their marquee customer base position them well to execute on their growth strategy.”
See also: DataStax Astra just made Cassandra Serverless. Here's why that's a game-changer.
DataStax, which traditionally focussed on enterprise support and services for the distributed open source database Apache Cassandra (widely used by enterprise customers ranging from Netflix to FedEx), has made a number of strategic acquisitions and significant opensource contributions in recent months with the aim of providing enterprise customers with a comprehensive, Kubernetes-based, developer-ready data stack.
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The company recently acquired Apache Pulsar specialist Kesque, moving it deeper into the data streaming support space. Over the past eight months it has also opensourced K8ssandra, to help developers deploy Apache Cassandra on Kubernetes (now central to most teams that are deploying, scaling, and managing containerised applications); opensourced Stargate (a data gateway that sits between applications and the underlying database so that developers can use JSON, REST, and GraphQL API extensions without having to learn the Cassandra specific query language), and also taken Cassandra serverless with its Astra platform.
The ultimate plan: become the go-to vendor for enterprises wanting help building and supporting an comprehensive open, cloud-native data infrastructure, but not wanting to get deeply locked into a set of hyperscaler services (whether database, or managed streaming services.)
As major user of open source streaming and database technologies itself, Goldman looks like a natural partner and an intriguing investor (one Goldman Sachs IT team has described Apache Kafka, for example, as the "backbone of its architecture"). The Stack will try to track down the sum invested...
