The EPFL spin-off Raw Labs, known for its revolutionary data management solution, has completed a USD 5.5M Pre-Series A funding round led by Verve Ventures and a group of investors specializing in investments of high growth technology companies. Verve Ventures contributed USD 1.6 million. The funding will enable RAW Labs to accelerate the acquisition of large enterprise clients and continue investing in the expansion of the capabilities of its core NoDB data platform. Claude Honegger (former global CIO of Credit Suisse) and Pyrros Koussios (former private equity investor and senior executive at international technology companies) are joining the board of directors. Raw Labs appointed Lars Farnstrom as its new CEO.

RAW Labs is a disruptive data management solution based on the result of over 25 man-years of academic research. It is co-founded by Prof. Anastasia Ailamaki, who heads the Data-Intensive Applications and Systems Laboratory at EPFL. RAW Labs’ NoDB is a platform for data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts to seamlessly access, query, clean, and enhance heterogeneous data sources in near real time and transform them into high-value data products for consumption by analytical tools, ML-models, and enterprise applications. What makes RAW NoDB unique is its revolutionary query engine, which unlike any other solution in the market uses Category Theory. This gives RAW the unique capability to query large and complex data sources at high performance without the need for any costly and time-consuming ETL/ELT preprocessing or integration with data sources.

Read our interview with Prof. Anastasia Ailamaki and Lars Farnstrom to learn more about Raw Labs.

Why we invested in Raw Labs: 

The world-class founding team has gathered equally impressive advisors around it such as Prof. Mike Franklin (co-creator of ApacheSpark at AMPLAb Berkeley), Prof. Martin Odersky (the creator of the Scala programming language) and Alon Halevy, director of Facebook AI.

The commercial focus will be supported by investors such as Dave Brown, Ariel Luedi (who sold Hybris to SAP for 1.5 billion) who will also act as a board member, and the investors of Key Capital which bring decades of experience in software, data and M&A.

The enterprise data management market is a massive global opportunity that was demonstrated by the IPO of Snowflake and the commercial interest from some of the world’s biggest companies in using RAW is evident by a full pipeline of sales leads.