StreamNative, the unified messaging and streaming platform founded by the original developers of Apache Pulsar, announced it has raised $23 million in its Series-A round led by Prosperity7 Ventures, the diversified growth fund of Aramco Ventures, and followed by their seed investors.

To learn more, VMblog spoke with Sijie Guo, Co-Founder and CEO of StreamNative.

VMblog:  First off, congratulations on your recent Series A funding.  Why was this the right time?

Sijie Guo:  The investment in StreamNative underscores the market shift from legacy messaging technologies to real-time data and streaming on Kubernetes. StreamNative draws upon the expertise of its founders Sijie Guo and Matteo Merli, who started developing real-time messaging and streaming technologies together at Yahoo! in 2010. They went on to create Apache Pulsar and today are members of the PMC, Matteo is its Chairman.

The company brings an unmatched team of Pulsar leadership and developer expertise to the Pulsar community and is building a platform that will enable companies to manage the entire lifecycle of data in any cloud environment across the enterprise.

VMblog:  How is StreamNative different from what already exists in the market?

Guo:  StreamNative enables companies to manage the entire lifecycle of data in any cloud environment across the enterprise. The flexibility offered through both hosted and non-hosted offerings and the depth of expertise in unified real-time messaging and streaming for large enterprises brings customers of all sizes a new and differentiated offering and experience, particularly at a time when Kubernetes and microservices applications are demanding more from messaging and streaming.

VMblog:  Is Apache Pulsar just an alternative to Apache Kafka?

Guo:  First, Pulsar is different from Kafka - it is not an apples to apples comparison. Kafka is a streaming platform only. Pulsar is a single unified system, combining a streaming and messaging platform into one. You could think about it like combining Kafka and RabbitMQ. Pulsar is also unique because it supports both streaming and queueing use cases, while also supporting a wide feature set that makes it a viable alternative to many other distributed messaging technologies in the market. Pulsar's multi-layered architecture allows users to scale the number and size of topics more conveniently than other messaging systems. While a lot of the publicity we had seen around Pulsar compares it to Kafka for streaming workloads, Pulsar also handles queueing needs.

VMblog:  What is StreamNative going to do with the funding?

The funding will enable StreamNative to advance the state-of-the-art in streaming, stream storage and messaging technologies. From real-time microservices that use Pulsar's pub/sub features and streaming storage for real-time analytics to infinite storage for deep analysis, Pulsar's flexible architecture and industry leading feature-set deliver new capabilities. 

StreamNative will also be integrating Data Lakehouse technologies such as Databrick's Delta Lake and Apache Hudi to allow batch access to data stored in Pulsar. This will enable near real-time access to data with industry standard batch data processing tools like Spark, AWS Redshift, Presto/Trino. StreamNative is also working to build connectors for Apache Flink and Apache Spark to bring next-generation capabilities with unified batch and stream connectors.

The funding will also help StreamNative triple its global staff across all departments to accelerate product development, ecosystem expansion, and customer acquisition.