Today, we are thrilled to announce Madrona’s investment in Bobsled, a cross-cloud data sharing platform. Madrona co-led the $17M Series A round alongside Greycroft Partners with participation from existing investor .406 Ventures. Bobsled is already seeing exciting early traction with customers, including LinkUp, Facteus, and TrueData, and has emerged as an important new entrant to the modern data stack.
Late last year, Madrona described our view that data boundaries are blurring in a multi-cloud world. Today, data lives across five platforms: AWS, Azure, GCP, Snowflake, and Databricks. But those platforms are not designed to work together. Each of these companies has built technology to make it easy to share data with other teams operating within the same platform in an effort to encourage customers to pool their data in one place. But for companies and partners that operate across multiple clouds (there are so many), much of the cloud-native tooling leaves companies with functional gaps.
Today, cross-cloud data sharing is a labor-intensive, inflexible, security-challenged, and error-prone process. Companies have to assemble and manage thousands of distinct pipelines, which require extensive technical management, governance, and auditing. The teams that have scaled cross-cloud data sharing either employ large, dedicated data engineering teams (often with 50+ resources) or rely on solution integrators for development. Those that cannot afford the required resources are often forced to revert to delivering CSVs or files through legacy technologies like email or FTP.
This is where Bobsled comes in. Bobsled’s platform enables data sources – whether a SaaS app like Stripe or a data provider like CoreLogic – to share data to another team’s data lake or warehouse using the sharing protocols native to each platform. Bobsled provides a single control plane that enables users to provision and manage sharing across any platform without dealing with subscriptions or configurations in the destination. With Bobsled, customers can easily understand who has access to different data sources and ensure that key factors like entitlements, privacy, versioning, lineage, and observability are all managed.
We see Bobsled as part of a broader shift in the way companies build and share data products. Traditionally, data consumers have been responsible for the cost and effort required to prepare data from external sources for analysis within their environment. But that’s changing as sources of external data recognize that eliminating these barriers has become a critical selection criteria for many data teams. Bobsled and other products such as Stripe Data Pipeline are examples of that economic inversion — where data producers provide easy and scalable ways for data consumers to access data in the consumers’ chosen environments. Stripe used its considerable engineering resources to build Stripe Data Pipeline, and Bobsled now makes it easy for any data producer to do the same thing to access new and bigger revenue streams.
Bobsled’s team is clearly the right one to take on this ambitious mission. Before co-founding Bobsled, Jake Graham was a Microsoft Azure Data Exchange Platform leader. He is deeply familiar with this problem and how customers struggle with data exchange. Soma first met Jake in the spring of 2022 and was impressed with his passion for seamlessly making data available to everybody, no matter where the data was. The vision of building a data sharing platform resonated with us immensely, and that, combined with a solid founding team in Jake, Josh, and Andy, is why we leaned into partnering with Bobsled.
Madrona has backed Modern Data Stack companies for over a decade, with companies like Snowflake, MotherDuck, FaunaDB, RelationalAI, and now Bobsled (and more to come). We are excited to partner with Jake, Josh, Andy, and the entire Bobsled team to accelerate the future of data sharing across platforms. By providing a seamless and secure solution for data sharing, Bobsled is revolutionizing the way businesses interact with data, making it easier than ever before to share and monetize data across different clouds and platforms. #Justbobsledit
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