SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--ZEPL today announced $4.1 million in Series A funding, with a fresh new brand. Formerly known as NFLabs, ZEPL is the company founded by the creators of Apache Zeppelin. With this new funding, the company plans to continue to disrupt the enterprise analytics space. The round was led by Vertex Ventures, with participation from Translink Capital, Specialized Types, and Big Basin Capital. With the funding, In Sik Rhee, General Partner at Vertex Ventures, joins the company’s board.
“Our new brand identity, ZEPL—Zeppelin REPL—reflects our mission to provide an interface for modern day analytics workflows,” said Sejun Ra, co-founder and CEO at ZEPL. “For decades, enterprise analytics has been mired in silos—data silos, skill silos, team silos—that regardless of computational power, hindered speed and efficiency of analytics. And though recent advances in Hadoop, Spark, and other compute frameworks alleviate some of the data silos issues, the myriad of choices further compounds the skill and team silos.”
Apache Zeppelin breaks down those walls by providing a beautiful, pluggable, open source solution to the problem. With Zeppelin, data engineers, data scientists, and business analysts can all use and share the same interface to source, process, and analyze all data types. Apache Zeppelin supports most modern day frameworks—from Spark, Cassandra, MongoDB, Elastic Search—as well as standard relational databases (Oracle, MySQL) with its JDBC interpreter.
“We have been watching the organic growth of Zeppelin for some time, and are incredibly impressed with the demand and adoption of the technology, by everyone from small teams to the largest Fortune 100 companies,” said In Sik Rhee, General Partner at Vertex Ventures. “Enterprises have been clamoring for a way to seamlessly apply analytics across their organization. The team at ZEPL has a clear vision to drastically change the way companies leverage analytics to further their business goals, and we are pleased to support them as they expand Zeppelin’s reach.”
“We are inspired by its contributors and adoption to date. With the new funding, we look forward to expanding the Apache Zeppelin experience to deliver a single platform for end-to-end data analytics workflow,” continued Ra.
Apache Zeppelin is fast becoming the standard big data visualization interface to explore and conduct deep data analysis. It is integrated and available with Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Dataproc, as well as most of the major Hadoop distributions. It has also been adopted by hundreds of companies across numerous verticals, from finance to high-tech.
“Our mission is to transform the way people engage with data, and make big data analytics accessible and easy to use by anyone within an organization,” said Moon Soo Lee, creator of Apache Zeppelin and co-founder and CTO of ZEPL. “By building on top of Apache Zeppelin’s extensible, pluggable, open interface, we believe we can tear down the walls that currently limit how organizations leverage and communicate analytics.”
“Apache Zeppelin has become an important tool at Twitter for creating and sharing interactive data analytics and visualizations,” said Prasad Wagle, Technical Lead in the Data Platform team at Twitter. “Since it integrates seamlessly with all the popular data analytics engines, it is very easy to create and share reports and dashboards. With its extensible architecture and a vibrant Open Source community, I am looking forward to Apache Zeppelin advancing the state of the art in data analytics and visualization.”
About ZEPL
ZEPL is leading the way in breaking down silos in traditional data analytics workflows. Founded and run by the creators of the Apache Zeppelin project, ZEPL is focused on providing an end-to-end data analytics platform for all data types. Apache Zeppelin, one of the most popular project in ASF, is a web-based notebook that enables interactive data analytics and provides one interface for data engineers, data scientists, as well as business analysts and decision makers. For more information, please visit www.zepl.com.