Google Cloud has acquired Dataform, a UK start-up that aims to make it easier for businesses to manage their data warehouses, for an undisclosed fee.
The deal is believed to primarily be an acqui-hire, although Dataform’s founders are likely to have received a considerable sum.
Dataform was founded in 2018 by two ex-Google employees to help data teams publish, test, and collaborate on datasets at scale. The company secured a €1.8 million investment last year and it is believed to have been working on a Series A funding round. The Google acquisition will probably mean that fundraising is less of a priority now.
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Data deluge
Responding to the acquisition, Huon explained that Dataform came to a decision that the company could achieve more by coming under the Google Cloud umbrella. With a current team of just seven, the start-up’s resources are limited; with Google behind them, there will be an opportunity to scale rapidly.
In terms of immediate developments, Dataform Web will continue to be run and maintained by Dataform and will be free of charge for all new and existing customers. Support for the BigQuery managed data warehouse solution will be the company’s main focus for the foreseeable future.
Although there is more data than ever before available to businesses, drawing insights from that data is not always easy – particularly where large-scale data warehouses are concerned. By working closely with Google Cloud, Dataform should be able to empower companies to make better use of the data at their disposal – no matter how much of it they’re in possession of.
“We’ve followed Google’s products and successes within analytics closely over the past few years, and always felt that they were a product leader when it came to cloud data warehousing, SQL, and now business intelligence; with products such as Looker that inspired us significantly in our own journey,” explained Guillaume-Henri Huon, co-founder and CTO at Dataform.
“After several conversations with the Google Cloud team it became clear that we are deeply aligned on the importance of serving analysts with the right tools and technology in order to fill what we all perceive as a missed opportunity in existing solutions.”
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Via TechCrunch
