Dozer, an open-source data infrastructure platform that helps engineers instantly create highly scalable real-time data APIs, today announced US$3 million in seed funding. Led by Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia’s Surge, the fundraise also saw participation from Gradient Ventures and January Capital. The new funding will contribute to the scaling of product and engineering teams. The company has emerged from stealth and its platform is now openly accessible to developers.
As companies increase their efforts to digitise, every company is becoming a software company. And with this, many companies also become data companies. This has resulted in a significant focus on data engineering and the rise of the ‘Modern Data Stack’ (MDS). This market initially centred on data warehouses such as Snowflake, Big Query and Redshift, but has since seen significant investments in areas like ingestion/data integration, data transformation, data visualisation and more.
Despite significant investment into what is now a multi-billion dollar market, the impact has not extended beyond IT users in a meaningful way. Data can now be stored, managed, secured and catalogued in better ways by IT departments, but the value of this data has not been fully unlocked for the business unit or business users. Business users may have better insights or enhanced intelligence, but they still struggle to fully unlock the value from the data they have and build better products and services for their customers to drive new revenue streams.
Because the last mile of the modern data stack remains unsolved, building data APIs continues to be difficult. Unlocking internal data sources for use for external customers continues to be a very tough process that requires streaming updates, scheduling, transformation, multiple document stores, caching, API backend, etc. The complexity now needs to be managed by large teams of data engineers, full-stack engineers, and even data scientists.
The team at Dozer believe that it should be simple and effortless to create data APIs. Dozer offers a plug-and-play data infrastructure backend that allows engineers to easily connect with any data source, combine them and create real-time APIs to build end-user applications in minutes, all with a simple configuration. Dozer connects with a wide variety of databases such as Postgres and MySQL, data warehouses such as Snowflake, and even the Ethereum blockchain ledger, allowing engineers to aggregate data across multiple sources to glean real-time insights and build features for customer personalisation.
Dozer is open-source and built in Rust, a low-level programming language that is well known for its fast performance and memory safety, and can be extended to support new data sources or transformations. “We believe that companies will continue to invest in real-time, data-driven products that offer users a 10x experience – and the picks & shovels that enable this will unlock tremendous value. Dozer offers a novel approach to building data APIs, playing in a very strategic and potentially large TAM”, said Matteo and Vivek, Co-founders of Dozer. “Dozer was born from the result of multiple painful experiences in delivering scalable data products at different organisations such as DBS Bank, Goldman Sachs, DataRobot and PaySense (now PayU) ”.
Dozer co-founders Matteo Pelati and Vivek Gudapuri
Dozer is co-founded by Matteo Pelati and Vivek Gudapuri. With over 20 years of software and data engineering experience, Matteo has been part of data engineering leadership teams and built real-time data platforms at some of the most data-driven yet architecturally complex organisations including Goldman Sachs, DBS, and DataRobot. Vivek comes with deep product and platform engineering expertise, having led technical teams and scaled platforms in fast-growing technology companies like PaySense and Yojee.
