Dataform, a startup in the U.K. that was building what it dubbed an “operating system” for data warehouses, has been quietly acquired by Google’s Google Cloud division.
Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, although I understand this is mostly an acqui-hire, albeit one where the founders — both ex-Googlers prior to founding Dataform — have done well out of. However, it isn’t just about talent; Google is said to have been very interested in the company’s product, too — in fact, “Dataform web” is now being offered for free going forward.
One source with knowledge of the deal described it as a very decent outcome for Dataform’s founders, Lewis Hemens and Guillaume-Henri Huon. I also understand that Dataform was well on its way to raising a Series A, so there were definitely other options.
An alumni of Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator and backed by LocalGlobe, Dataform had set out to help data-rich companies draw insights from the data stored in their data warehouses. Mining data for insights and business intelligence typically requires a team of data engineers and analysts. Dataform wanted to simplify this task and in turn make it faster and cheaper for organisations to take full advantage of their data assets.
Joining Google Cloud should enable the team to continue that mission. More broadly, the space is hot right now, including Snowflake’s successful IPO.
“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,” writes Guillaume-Henri Huon on Dataform’s website.
“At the same time, as a team of just 7, in a complex, competitive and rapidly changing market, we had more ideas than we had people or resources to accomplish. There has always been so much more we wanted to do each quarter than we could achieve. With the support of the BigQuery and Cloud Analytics teams and our combined thought leadership and efforts, we felt that together we could achieve something bigger than we could separately”.