Today we are excited to announce our investment in XetHub. Intelligent apps are the present and future of software, but the systems most developers use to build these applications are not optimized for data — in fact, they don’t work very well at all. Developers have to flip back and forth between systems that hold code and data. Everyone who works on a project and has to constantly coordinate with team members and switch between tools understands the significant drag this workflow has on efficiency, productivity, and accuracy. XetHub is bringing the ease of how developers work with code in GitHub to data. Their product is available, and we are excited by the early response. Today, XetHub announced their $7.5 million seed round, led by Madrona.
XetHub is a true Madrona day-one company. Founder Yucheng Low co-founded the early and transformative ML/AI company, Turi, which Apple acquired in 2016 for $200 million to fuel its ML innovation. Madrona funded Turi 10 years ago and helped define the term “intelligent applications” while working with Yucheng, Carlos Guestrin, and the amazing Turi team. At Apple, Yucheng worked on systems to make big datasets available to developers across Apple. He worked with XetHub’s other co-founders, Rajat Arya (also an early Turi employee) and Ajit Banerjee, at Apple to build an internal system that helped groups across the company access and leverage large datasets regardless of their location.
Given the problems they saw at Apple, the founders realized accessing and leveraging large datasets was a problem across the industry, not just inside Apple. Madrona jumped at the chance to work with these founders again and invited them to set up shop at Madrona in 2021, working with them to build and launch a product. The founders quickly assembled a team and workshopped his idea with customers, Madrona investors, and well-placed advisers, including Carlos Guestrin, now a professor focused on applied ML at Stanford, and Shanku Niyogi, VP of product at Databricks, previously SVP of product at GitHub.
The end result is XetHub, which brings data and code together and enables fast, seamless collaboration in a Git-enabled environment at scale — regardless of physical location. With XetHub, developers can now work with data using the same conventions they have used with code for at least a decade. They can check data in and out, ensuring data is not corrupted or changed inadvertently – while creating a clear governance record. XetHub works with 1TB datasets today, and the company plans to launch support for 100TB datasets soon. XetHub provides developers with the tools to build modern, intelligent applications quickly and easily.
Related Insights
