Big data analytics startup Ahana has raised $ 20 million in Series A funding, the company said on Tuesday.

Ahana will use the funding to accelerate the development of its cloud-based data query engine and expand its go-to-market sales and marketing teams, Ahana co-founder and CEO Steven Mih said in an interview. with CRN.

Ahana, launched in June 2020 and based in San Mateo, Calif., Previously raised $ 4.8 million in seed funding rounds, bringing its total funding to $ 24.8 million.

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The Series A funding was led by Third Point Ventures, the emerging technology investment arm of investment advisory firm Third Point LLC. The oversubscribed round of funding included participation from existing investors GV (formerly Google Ventures), Leslie Ventures and Lux ​​Capital. Robert Schwartz, Managing Partner of Third Point Ventures, joins Ahana’s Board of Directors.

Ahana’s managed service Ahana Cloud, which debuted in September 2020, is an SQL query engine that speeds up queries over huge volumes – even petabytes – of structured and unstructured data in AWS data lakes. S3.

Data lakes are huge unorganized data stores. The ability to efficiently run queries on data lakes is touted by Ahana and other proponents of the data lake concept, including Databricks and Starburst, as a more flexible and less expensive alternative to data warehouse systems.

Ahana’s technology is based on the open source PrestoDB query engine which was originally developed within Facebook and is now under the Linux Foundation.

The Ahana cloud is adopted by customers for a range of use cases, including reporting and dashboards, data transformation, data science and customer-centric analytics, said Dipti Borkar, co -Founder and Product Manager of Ahana, in the interview.

“It’s a huge market,” she said. “The next 10 years of analysis are all about the data lake.”

“We’re at a phenomenal intersection of data, cloud, open source, and analytics that will drive many unicorns – it already is,” said Mih, using the term for startups with valuations of. $ 1 billion or more. “And we see ourselves as a company that will do very well over time,” he said, adding that the company has seen substantial growth over the past year despite launching at around the same. when the global COVID-19 pandemic began.

Mih said most of the new funding will be used to expand Ahana’s technical teams and accelerate product development. Some will go to work with the Presto community to evangelize the technology behind Ahana’s offerings. And some will be used to hire additional sales and marketing staff to expand marketing efforts and drive customer demand.

Ahana largely sells its services in cloud markets and works with a number of partners who provide systems integration, data analysis consulting and support services, Mih said.

“As we see the evolution of modern analytics, we see a new stack emerging alongside the data warehouse,” Schwartz of Third Point Ventures said in a statement. “Businesses need an open and flexible approach to accessing their data, and the data lake with Presto on top makes it possible. Ahana Cloud provides the foundation for this new stack, giving all platform teams the ability to easily use Presto on their data lake. With Ahana, any business can take advantage of the open data lake for their analytics. It is extremely powerful.