Founded in June 2022 by data entrepreneurs Paul Dudley and Ricky Thomas, Streamkap aims to make real-time data accessible and cost-effective for businesses. The company offers a low-maintenance streaming ETL platform built on Apache Kafka and Flink, enabling fast and easy data transfer.

In today's digital age, consumers expect immediate and seamless experiences. Real-time data has become crucial for meeting these expectations, whether it's tracking a food delivery, receiving instant financial updates, or enjoying personalised shopping experiences.

For instance, users expect real-time updates on ride or food delivery locations. Delays or outdated information can lead to frustration and poor user experiences. In e-commerce, real-time data allows for up-to-the-minute product recommendations, stock updates, and personalised promotions, enhancing the shopping experience.

The acquisition of Streamkap partner Rockset by OpenAI underscores the importance of real-time data in AI applications. Real-time data is vital for AI tasks like retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which integrates enterprise-specific data to improve large language models' accuracy and relevance.

Streamkap's platform helps businesses integrate low-latency data streams seamlessly, crucial for industries such as finance, e-commerce, healthcare, and entertainment. Real-time data enhances customer experiences, informs decision-making, and improves operational efficiency.

For example, Streamkap collaborates with e-commerce site BrandAlley to power real-time personalisation, similar to TikTok's "For You" page, leading to increased engagement and sales.

Paul Dudley, Co-Founder of Streamkap, said: "Today, consumers increasingly expect and demand real-time experiences, and businesses need faster data to power these experiences and make critical decisions. We're making real-time data easy by helping companies get low-latency data into modern data platforms with the simplicity of a traditional cloud-based ETL."

For data teams, Streamkap enables faster data without requiring a complete overhaul of their data infrastructure – all at a fraction of the cost of batch processing or higher-maintenance streaming solutions.

These factors were crucial in why customers like SpotOn, which provides point-of-sale solutions for restaurants and retail businesses, have chosen to partner with Streamkap. "Streamkap has been a game-changer for us in terms of delivering real-time data to our customers," said Marcin Migda, Staff Data Engineer at SpotOn. "Their solution was 4x faster and 3x cheaper than our previous setup, and it slots right into our existing Snowflake data stack."

Streamkap will use the new funding to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams, which have already doubled in size this year. On the product side, the company is investing in new capabilities for stream processing to enable transformations that further reduce latency.

Ricky Thomas, Co-Founder of Streamkap, commented: "We've seen tremendous demand from companies wanting to make their data real-time, whether they're looking to speed up their existing data stack with Snowflake or other real-time technologies.”

"Streamkap is positioned at the intersection of major trends in data – the shift to real-time and the rise of the modern data stack," said Roberto Bonanzinga Partner at InReach Ventures. "The team's deep expertise in data infrastructure and track record scaling data businesses make them well-equipped to become a key player in this space."