Portland startup Hydrolix is bucking the venture capital slowdown and raised $20 million in a Series A.
The round was led by Nava Ventures. Previous backers Wing Venture Capital, Oregon Venture Fund, AV8 Ventures and S3 Ventures also participated.
The capital will be used to beef up sales, product marketing and customer support. The company is also gearing up to reopen its Portland headquarters by signing a new lease in the coworking space Kiln Portland in Southeast. The company has 26 employees, with eight of them based out of the headquarters.
Hydrolix is the latest startup up from Portland entrepreneur Marty Kagan, who previously founded Cedexis. That company sold to Citrix Systems in 2018.
With Hydrolix he is once again in the data management space. Although this time instead of managing web traffic, as with Cedexis, the product is aimed at a much bigger pain point for customers: The increasing cost of data storage and querying that data.
Hydrolix is focused on company data that doesn’t change, such as logs for observability of how software is working. Typically, as company data gets bigger, it needs to build bigger clusters to store the data and it eventually becomes untenable to store everything, Kagan said in a previous interview. That means companies must then start discarding data, usually older data. And those timeframes for saving data can get smaller and smaller.
That means that instead of having six months of log information, a company may only have it for two weeks or two days or two hours. This can mean a company might be discarding data that is valuable for machine learning and other business intelligence because it’s too costly to keep.
Kagan has described this as data anxiety.
Target customers include companies for which data is the second largest expense behind payroll. Entertainment company Paramount and security company Arkose Labs are two early customers who report their costs decreased by four times while they were able to quadruple their data retention, the company said in a statement.
Including this Series A Hydrolix has raised a total of $33 million from investors. The company was founded in 2018 by Kagan and Chief Technology Officer Hasan Alayli.
A funding round of this size is usually notable in the Portland tech community. However, this year it might be even more so as investment activity in the state and across the metro has slowed significantly along with activity across the country.
Based on first quarter data, this round is one of the largest so far this year for an Oregon-based startup.
