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Cube Dev, the company and lead developer of the open source Cube.js ‘analytical API platform’, today announced that it has raised $ 15.5 million in a round of A funding for bring its first commercial product to the market.

Big data can provide businesses with a treasure trove of valuable information: Pooling data from CRM, marketing and customer support platforms could unlock consumer buying trends that would not be impossible with silos separate data. A typical process to achieve this may involve an ‘extract, load, transform’ (ELT) approach, combining data ingestion and integration tools with cloud-based data warehouses such as Snowflake or BigQuery to mold the data. data in a standard format for easier analysis. But how do companies actually leverage this data to create internal Business Intelligence dashboards or add analytics to existing customer applications? This is where Cube.js comes in.

Take the example of a consumer credit application that allows its users to explore their spending and transaction history using tables and charts. In a proprietary world, the application developer may choose to license a GUI from a Business Intelligence (BI) provider such as Looker or Tableau. However, with a per-user pricing model, things can start to get quite expensive on a large scale, while limited customization options can also make the design and layout less compelling and ‘on the brand’.

“For this reason, when a company wants to build a data analytics application, it typically takes all the complex steps needed to access, transform, and serve data from its cloud data warehouse into its front-end,” co-founder and CEO of Cube Dev Artyom Keydunov says VentureBeat.

“Headless abstraction layer”

In a nutshell, Cube.js provides developers with the backend infrastructure that connects their aggregated and transformed data to end user visualizations. It is designed to bypass many technical barriers, such as SQL generation, caching, API design, request orchestration and acceleration, security, etc., by positioning itself as a “layer headless abstraction ‘between the data warehouses and the application.

“Cube.js replaces several manual steps that developers must take regardless of their stack vendors,” Keydunov said. “We often refer to Cube as the ‘API layer’ between the warehouse and the application. “

Cube.js comes with app templates for building a dashboard app on top of a data warehouse, using various open source libraries and tools.

And then there is the playground of Cube.js developers, a web tool for generating and displaying a data schema, creating and running queries against a data warehouse, and plotting the results.

Above: Cube.js: Creating a query and plotting the results in the developers’ playground:

In short, Cube.js helps organizations “translate big data” into data-driven applications by removing much of the construction work from the data engineering process, while giving developers greater design flexibility. and development.

“Companies have already used the open source Cube.js library to build applications on data from cloud data warehouses like BigQuery and Snowflake because it saves them months of time compared to building their own layers. semantics and caching on top of a large data store. », Keydunov explained.

To further develop and market the open source Cube.js project, Cube Dev is using its new capital to develop a cloud-hosted SaaS version of Cube.js in collaboration with “selected customers”, which will serve as a “fully managed API.” layer “to build data applications on any cloud. Keydunov said he plans to launch Cube Cloud later in 2021, but does not have the freedom to share many additional details about the product.

Above: Cloud of cubes

The story so far

The genesis of Cube.js dates back to 2016, when Keydunov and his co-founder Pavel Tiounov were working on a previous business intelligence startup called Statsbot. In the years that followed, the duo saw enough developer demand for Cube.js to release it under an open source license in 2019, and it has since attracted users from large companies like IBM, PayPal, Intuit, and F5. Based on that pull, Keydunov and Tiunov chose to focus fully on Cube Dev last summer.

Cube Dev Series A was led by Decibel, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Betaworks and Eniac Ventures. The company previously raised $ 6.2 million through a seed fundraiser last September.