About Dremio
Dremio was founded in 2015 by Tomer Shiran and Jacques Nadeau, engineers with backgrounds in big data infrastructure at companies including MapR, based on the observation that many organizations had accumulated enormous volumes of data in relatively low-cost cloud object storage, often called a "data lake," but that querying this data quickly and interactively for analytics purposes traditionally required first loading it into a separate, more expensive, and more rigidly structured data warehouse system, creating additional cost, complexity, and delay before data could actually be analyzed.
Dremio's platform provides a fast SQL query engine that can run directly against data stored in open, cloud-based data lake formats without requiring that data to first be copied and transformed into a separate warehouse system, an architectural approach often called a "data lakehouse" that aims to combine the cost efficiency and flexibility of data lake storage with query performance and usability closer to what a traditional data warehouse offers. The company has been a significant proponent of and contributor to open data lakehouse table formats such as Apache Iceberg, which provide warehouse-like capabilities, including support for updates, deletes, and schema evolution, directly on top of data lake storage, reducing the degree to which organizations are locked into a single proprietary vendor's storage and query technology. Dremio's positioning has particularly resonated with organizations wary of the ongoing costs and vendor lock-in associated with proprietary cloud data warehouses, offering what it argues is comparable query performance and usability while keeping data in open formats that remain portable across different query engines and tools. The company's customers span large enterprises with substantial data volumes seeking more cost-efficient and flexible data architecture than traditional data warehousing alone provides. Dremio has raised substantial venture funding from investors including Insight Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Norwest Venture Partners, reaching a valuation exceeding $2 billion, competing with cloud data warehouse vendors including Snowflake and Databricks.
