The start starting up behind the Polars Source Tool raises $ 21 million from ACCEL

PolarsThe company, which is based in Amsterdam, is behind An open source project with the same nameShe raised 18 million euros (about $ 21 million) in the ACCEL series, with the participation of Bain Capital Partners and Angel Investors. But while collecting this type of money is the dream of many developers, its creator Richie Fink did not start doing so.

Everything began as a project for pets during Covid. Disappeared PandaAn organizing and working tool with data schedules, VINK decided to create a better rust query engine. Five years old, Polars is widely used by data scientists and its teams for data processing Faster.

This combination of performance and popularity was what caught the attention of investors in the project, but the series A was moved by a Polars road map to become a developed company. Two years later Launching a companyThe company was launched in February Polars CloudData data platform that allows users to operate in a large -scale cloud.

“In the open source community, the joke is that you can rewrite anything in rust and becomes better,” said Zenin Lujinov, an Access partner, who led the financing round. “The reason that a joke is that it is not a real sustainable advantage, and you have to do a lot.”

For VIKS and co -founder, the former Xomnia CTO Chiel Peters, more means building products around the tool, such as Polars Cloud and distributed polars. The latter is a distributor engine that supports use cases that include data houses, instead of small data collections, and is currently available in the general experimental version. Fink said that building the new feature is what most funding will go to.

With the distribution of Polars, the startup aims to challenge the Apache Spark, which established the Databrics creators.

For Polars, after the Pandas’ market share It was enough to secure a A seed tour of $ 4 million Under the leadership of Bain Capital in 2023. But Pandas is still open source without a dedicated commercial platform, and although Polars exceeded 24 million downloadThe course of the returns will be unclear whether the Polars distributor and the ability to expand from one device to a managed group.

While Loginov referred to this to the second “most interesting” market, he agreed with VINK that the value of Polars in bridging the scale gap between Pandas and Spark. “If you go to your ability to process data groups of any size and complexity, you are a lot of challenges for many companies. So we felt that the final market may be very large,” said Loginov.

Polars claims that the primary product is already used in production through financing, life sciences and logistical services. However, Polars Cloud and Polars Distribtuted open a new chapter for the company.

For other founders who hope to convert open source projects into commercial projects, Loginov refers to a major lesson from Vink. “Polar has become successful because he had a really big problem – he found a place where the technology available today is old mile. So I would like to suggest finding a big problem.”