Prophecy, a low-code platform for data engineering, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series A round led by Insight Partners. Existing investors SignalFire and Berkeley Skydeck, as well as new investor Dig Ventures, also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $31 million.
At the core of the Prophecy user experience is its low-code environment, which allows data engineers and analysts to seamlessly switch between a visual interface and a code editor for building workflows. This interface makes it easy to quickly create Apache Spark code and then execute it through its Airflow service.
It’s this ability to switch back and forth between code and the visual interface, with changes on either side immediately reflected on the other — combined with the ability to extend the visual interface with custom elements as needed — that the team hopes will give it a leg up in the market. And since many enterprises are still using legacy tools, Prophecy also built a transpiler that allows businesses to modernize their existing ETL workflows.
“Everybody keeps talking about how data is the new oil. They’ve been talking about it for a decade, but then you go into large enterprises and the data management is a mess. So I’m like: we can fix this,” Prophecy co-founder Raj Bains said. He argues that while Databricks, which has partnered with Prophecy, and Snowflake are building the processing engines to use the data, enterprises still need a lot of tools to do the heavy lifting, especially as they are making the move to the cloud at the same time.
These enterprises, Bains noted, often sit on tens of thousands of data pipelines that run on-premises. So it made sense for Prophecy to build the tooling to help them modernize these pipelines and move them to the cloud — and ideally its platform, of course.
“We wrote this compiler, which is a very sophisticated tool,” he explained. “It will read their old data pipelines and automatically write these new data pipelines for the cloud and cloud technologies. So we can just take a big company with a massive data engineering footprint […] and we can just move the entire through the cloud. As large companies are looking to the cloud, they’re thinking about how to make the move and how to succeed — and we are working hand in hand with them to make this cloud migration and help them succeed in this new cloud world where it’s a completely different ecosystem.”
Despite its early stage, Prophecy’s customers already include a number of Fortune 500 and 50 companies that use it to build and manage their data infrastructure.
Insight Partner’s managing director George Mathew noted that there were a number of factors that got him interested in the firm, including Bains’ background of previously working at Hortonworks, Nvidia and Microsoft.
“It was just very clear that Raj and the team at Prophecy really understood what this last generation of systems, particularly in the data world, were — and where they needed to go in a cloud-native world and how to make that massive transition happen, particularly with the use of a low-code/no-code environment,” Mathew said. He also noted that the timing was right, given how much data many enterprises now accumulate in their data warehouses and lakes — something that wasn’t necessarily the case only a few years ago.
As Bains noted, this next year will be about polishing the product and helping its customers succeed in production. Unsurprisingly, the company plans to use the new funding to do just that and invest in the go-to-market side of its business as it builds out its full-stack data engineering platform.
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