BY TATUM HUNTER
OCTOBER 29, 2019
The good news: Data can help companies make more strategic decisions.
The bad news: Storing all that data has been expensive, traditionally.
More good news: Moore’s Law means companies can store more data at a lower cost as time goes on.
More bad news: Most companies are still operating by the old rules. Instead of storing the totality of their historical data for analysis, they hang onto just what’s required for compliance.
In most cases, that means companies end up with snapshots of their data at particular moments from the past, but no record of how it changed.
That limitation is at the heart of GRAX’s value proposition. The data storage and analytics platform announced today it raised $12 million to grow its reach and open new offices in Boston, the European Union and the Asia Pacific region.
GRAX integrates with Salesforce to archive every change in every field over time. It stores clients’ data in the cloud provider of their choice, and that full dataset is accessible for analytics. That way, companies own their historical data even if they stop using GRAX.
“One of the fundamental beliefs we have is not holding a customer hostage from their data,” GRAX CEO Joe Gaska told Built In.
The platform also lets users restore data to how it looked at any moment in time — like the moment before your co-worker accidentally deleted it.
As computing power increases and artificial intelligence advances, the value of historical data will grow as well. Gaska referenced Google’s recent quantum computing milestone as evidence that algorithm-agnostic data storage of every single data point at a company will become not just useful, but essential.
“The paradigm of big data is going to drastically expand. It’s not just big data. It’s infinite data,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is not build in a bias of technology, because we’re building it at the lowest and most cost-effective storage mechanism, so clients have the optionality to feed it into their AI of choice.”
One year in, GRAX is already profitable, with revenue increasing tenfold since the third quarter of 2018. This Series A round is the company’s first outside funding, and it plans to more than double its team in the next six months. GRAX’s revenue acquisition outpaces its hiring curves, Gaska said, so scaling is unlikely to affect profitability.
While GRAX has a remote-first global workforce of about 46, it’s looking for a downtown Boston space for its headquarters, with plans to add 10 to 20 people to its Boston-based team. It already has hubs in Hyderabad, Buenos Aires and San Francisco.
“We believe the most efficient and productive employees are ones whose workload isn’t burdened by the commute itself,” Gaska said. “Good work-life balance is really important to us, and it’s really worked out well for us the last few years.”
The company counts Fortune 100 companies and up-and-coming tech unicorns among its customers, according to a statement.
