The funding will allow Qbeast to accelerate go-to-market by filling key commercial positions and further investing in product development, technology, and partnerships.
Qbeast, a spin-off of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), announces its seed round of €2.5m led by Elaia, with the participation of new investors Sabadell Venture Capital and Uber Founding CTO Oscar Salazar and existing investor Inveready. Previous investors include BStartup Banco Sabadell and business angels.
The funding will allow Qbeast to accelerate go-to-market by filling key commercial positions and further investing in product development, technology, and partnerships.
Faster, cheaper, and easier-to-use data lakes
Qbeast’s solution simplifies the work for engineers managing data lakes. Qbeast organizes all the companies’ data so that they can read it efficiently from any solution they prefer, making it way cheaper to use their favorite Business Intelligence tool or train their Machine Learning models at scale.
“Companies dealing with data have little choice: if they want to know what is happening in their business, they need to use a data warehouse. While if they want to predict the future, optimize its processes and use Machine Learning, they need a data lake. They end up using different technologies and needing different people, but also with double the cloud bill and double the time to develop, which is a huge problem. At Qbeast, we are going to change this by making the life of data teams easier and data tools more efficient .” explains Cesare Cugnasco, CEO at Qbeast.
Qbeast developed the most advanced open-source format for data lakes to power its solution
Qbeast is building a community around the open-source data lake format. The Engineering team is currently further integrating the format within the modern data infrastructure stack to appeal to even more companies regardless of their technology stack.
Faster analytics and ML model training to drastically reduce cloud costs and energy consumption
For one of their clients, Qbeast improved execution time in their data analytics by 68% with full precision and by up to 50 times using sampling, enabling faster analytics, cloud cost savings, and lower energy consumption.
Qbeast has already signed paying clients, such as a Cybersecurity company. Furthermore, Qbeast collaborates with Preply with the aim of improving the efficiency of Machine Learning model training. Qbeast’s innovative solutions can be particularly interesting for Marketplaces, E-Commerce platforms, IoT, and companies from industries such as Advertising & Marketing, Manufacturing, Retail, and Financial Services.
“We are proud to back Qbeast and their highly-capable team anchored in advanced research. The founders are on a mission to reduce the friction that prevents hundreds of thousands of companies from efficiently leveraging data lakes because of their perceived complexity. There is a lot of value to be created by Qbeast and we can’t wait to start this journey together.” adds Sébastien Lefebvre, Partner at Elaia
A deep tech spin-off of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center
The trade-off between flexibility and efficiency in data analytics was already a pressing concern in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center when Cesare Cugnasco (CEO at Qbeast) started to design Qbeast in 2015, way ahead of the battle between Data Warehouse and Data Lake solutions. In 2020, he gathered a team of 4 co-founders, Pol Santamaria, Paola Pardo, Clemens Jesche, and Nicolas Escartin, and it was the start of Qbeast. Today, Qbeast put together a team of 14 talents, 4 of which joined since the closing of the round. The team combines skills in engineering and business and plans to grow further over the next year.
About Qbeast:
Qbeast optimizes the organization of data to simplify the work of Engineers and make it faster and cheaper to get insights, build data products, and train Machine Learning models at scale. Qbeast developed the most advanced open format for data lakes to power the solution. Qbeast is a spin-off of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
Learn more https://qbeast.io • https://github.com/Qbeast-io/qbeast-spark
About Elaia
Elaia is a European top-tier VC firm with a strong tech DNA. We back tech disruptors with global ambition from early stage to growth development. For the past 20 years, our commitment has been to deliver high performance with values.
We are proud to have been an active partner in over 100 startups including success stories such as Criteo (Nasdaq), Orchestra Networks (acquired by Tibco), Volterra (acquired by F5), Mirakl (valued $3.5B in Series E) and Shift Technology (valued $1B+ in Series D).
Learn more http://www.elaia.com • @Elaia_Partners
About Inveready
Inveready is a leading alternative asset manager in Spain - investing in early-stage VC, growth VC, venture debt, strategic equity in listed companies, infrastructure and private equity - providing financing solutions to companies throughout their life-cycle.
Founded in 2008, Inveready counts on 177 active companies, 61 exits and more than €1bn of assets under management.
Some of our portfolio companies have been acquired by multinationals such as Intel, Symantec, IBM, and Facebook, whilst others are listed in public markets such as NASDAQ, the Spanish BME Growth, AIM London, and Euronext Growth. (visit www.inveready.com for more information)
About Sabadell Venture Capital
Sabadell Venture Capital is the venture capital branch of Banco Sabadell - investing in seed VC, early-stage VC, venture debt, and alternative lending for growth companies - providing financing solutions to companies throughout their life cycle. Launched in 2016, Sabadell Venture Capital has more than 100 active companies, and more than €100M of assets under management. Some of our portfolio companies are Exoticca, RedPoints, Incapto Coffee or Impress.
https://sabadellventurecapital.com/