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Quickwit raises a $2.6M seed round to build the leading cloud-native search engine for large datasets

Quickwit raises a $2.6M seed round.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce our $2.6M seed funding co-led by FirstMark and firstminute with the participation of Eliot Horowitz (previously, Co-founder and CTO of MongoDB; currently CEO of Viam), Florian Douetteau, and Clément Stenac (CEO and CTO of Dataiku), and Isaac Saldana (previously, Founder and CEO of SendGrid and currently CEO of Memo).

Search is a mission-critical building block of any tech stack. Popular open-source search engines such as Elasticsearch or Solr are widely deployed throughout organizations around the world. However, those engines were developed more than ten years ago, and in the last decade, two fundamental trends accelerated. First, the amount of data stored in enterprise applications dramatically exploded. Second, the rise of cloud computing led to vast improvements in computing, storage, and network technologies.

As a result, companies struggle to run existing search systems at scale and must mobilize considerable resources and capital to do so.

The time has come for a radical redesign, from the ground up. As the authors of tantivy, the leading and fastest Rust search engine library, we are best positioned to engineer the search and analytics engine of tomorrow - one that addresses the shortcomings of its predecessors and leverages the full power and promise of the cloud. That’s why we founded Quickwit.

Quickwit is a distributed search engine designed to replace traditional search technologies deployed in log management platforms, data analytics solutions, and data lakes. Powered by Rust and tantivy, it offers unparalleled cost-efficiency and high reliability on large datasets.

Common use cases for Quickwit include:

  • Searching through logs, from small amounts of data to terabytes.
  • Adding full-text search capabilities to OLAP databases such as ClickHouse.
  • Searching through backups sitting on your cloud storage by adding Quickwit index files on your same storage.

After a year of development since our founding in 2021, Quickwit is already able to run sub-second queries over terabytes of data stored on Amazon S3, the first open-source search, and analytics engine to do so.

“Search is a deeply technical area and we were very impressed by the depth of this founding team, not just because they hail from places like Google, Airbnb, and Dataiku, but also because of the success of the Tantivy open source project,” said Matt Turck, Partner at FirstMark. “We believe their market timing is impeccable as the world is overdue for a new generation of search engines for the modern data era, and we are excited for the road ahead.”

However, building a fully-fledged database or search engine takes time, and there is a long road ahead of us to fulfill our complete vision. We’re incredibly grateful and humbled that we’ve found such amazing investors to support us through this journey. This round of funding will allow us to accelerate the development of Quickwit, further grow our community, and deliver an ambitious roadmap for 2022.

Key features that you can expect us to release in the following months include:

  • Ingest API (Elasticsearch-compatible)
  • Schemaless indexing
  • Aggregations (Elasticsearch-compatible)
  • Grafana data source
  • UI for querying and managing indexes

If you’re as excited about Quickwit as we are, we’d love for you to get involved. Download and try Quickwit, check out the source code on GitHub and open a pull request, join the community and say hello, or apply to join our growing team today!