- Ryft has emerged from stealth with an $8 million seed co-led by Index and Bessemer.
- It says it provides a more flexible data product than cloud giants — a boon in the age of AI.
- Three friends, who met in high school, founded Ryft, which has 13 employees.
Data management startup Ryft is emerging from a 10-month stealth period with an $8 million seed round.
Index Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners co-led the round, with participation from members of the founding teams at Wiz and Eon.
Ryft cofounder and CEO Yossi Reitblat told Business Insider the company provides a more flexible data product for its customers than cloud giants like Snowflake, Databricks, Microsoft, AWS, and Google.
In the age of AI where data is paramount to creating new models, companies "don't want to be locked with a single vendor and then only use their capabilities," he said. "They want to be able to mix and match."
Ryft handles data optimization, compliance, disaster recovery, and governance while allowing customers to take ownership of their data, allowing them to access it with different tools — such as those that write code for AI apps, Reitblat said. It works with companies across finance, e-commerce, adtech, gaming, and cybersecurity.
The New York-based company was founded by three friends who met in high school and subsequently worked together as software engineers in the Israel Defense Forces, building data software. In addition to Reitblat, there's CTO Yuval Yogev and vice president of research and development Guy Gadon. Ryft has 13 employees.
The team built Ryft for Apache Iceberg, an open-source analytic table software developed by Netflix. Ryft makes money by charging a yearly fee based on the amount of data it manages.
The seed round will go toward hiring more engineers, scaling sales efforts, and launching new products, Reitblat said.
Here's a look at the pitch deck that Ryft used to raise $8 million in seed funding.
