San Francisco-based startup Voltron Data has announced its acquisition of real-time AI platform Claypot, providing enterprises with a modular and composable approach to building systems for data analytics. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but the acquisition brings Claypot’s entire team under Voltron’s umbrella, allowing the company to expand its offering to include real-time analytics.
This acquisition is expected to unlock value from freshest data, enabling use cases like fraud detection and personalization. By integrating Claypot’s technology, Voltron Data aims to provide enterprises with a way to leverage the most up-to-date data for accurate predictions and insights into their production environments.
“Our two teams have been working together for the last eight months to build the first streaming data backend… and we are thrilled to bring all the Claypot AI founding members to Voltron Data to continue their work in streaming and unifying real-time and batch data processing. We’re bullish about what we’ll be able to achieve together,”
The Vision of Composability and Hardware Acceleration
Founded in 2022 and backed by $110 million in funding, Voltron Data draws inspiration from the animated series Voltron. The company combines multiple open source technologies, including Apache Arrow, Apache Parquet, and Ibis, to improve data access and analytics. Its modular approach allows teams to select the best component at each layer of the data stack, building systems that can adapt to evolving organizational needs.
In a recent development, Voltron Data introduced the Theseus distributed query engine, which leverages Nvidia GPUs and other hardware accelerators to accelerate CPU-dependent data preprocessing tasks. This innovation enables data preprocessing and AI/ML on GPUs, unifying data analytics and AI pipelines on the same infrastructure. The acquisition of Claypot AI further enhances Voltron’s modular systems and extends its vision of composability and hardware acceleration to real-time data and machine learning operations (MLOps).
Claypot AI: Leveraging Streaming and Batch Data Processing
Claypot AI, founded by former Nvidia and Netflix engineers Chip Huyen and Zhenzhong Xu, enables enterprises to leverage both streaming and batch data for various use cases. The platform allows users to choose the best-performing data based on latency, cost, and correctness requirements. Whether it’s a one-hour delay or real-time insights in milliseconds, Claypot AI provides the flexibility and agility required for dynamic data processing.
“Claypot works with both streaming and batch data, allowing you to choose the best-performing data for each use case. If a one-hour delay is good enough, we’ll switch to batch. Things are changing fast and you need a reaction in milliseconds? We’ll switch to streaming,”
With the addition of Claypot’s technology and team to Voltron Data, the company’s modular systems, which previously focused on local and batch data, can now deliver analytics from streaming data using open standards. This integration means that enterprises will have access to real-time AI, feature engineering, and MLOps capabilities powered by Theseus and other open-source products.
While the exact timeline for the integration of Claypot is yet to be determined, Voltron Data remains committed to breaking down technology silos and further advancing data analytics and AI. The company sees value in preprocessing structured and semi-structured data for ML/AI models and operating on real-time data streams with low latency requirements. Thesues is designed to handle workloads too large and time-sensitive for Spark and Presto. Voltron Data currently has no other acquisition plans but is open to partnering with top talent aligned with its vision for accelerated growth.
Since its launch, Voltron Data has gained numerous customers across major industries, including the federal government. The company is actively collaborating with federal agencies to accelerate query performance on petabyte-sized data. Additionally, Voltron Data partnered with HPE to integrate Theseus into HPE Ezmeral unified analytics software, expanding its reach and solution offerings.
“Our customers are experiencing increasing benefits of our accelerated solutions, expanding to larger, more critical data problems with ease,”
