Polars, the Amsterdam-based company behind the popular open source project of the same name, has raised 18 million euros (approximately $21 million) in the Series A round led by Accel, with participation from Bain Capital Partners and Angel Investors. But raising this kind of money is a dream for many developers, but its creator, Richie Vinck, did not set out to do so.
It all began as a pet project during Covid. Frustrated with the limitations of Panda, a tool for organizing and working with data tables, Vink decided to build a better query engine with Rust. Fast forward five years ago, Polars is now widely used for data scientists and teams’ ability to process data much faster.
This combination of performance and popularity attracted the attention of venture investors, but Series A was spurred by Polars’ roadmap to become a scalable business. Two years after launching the company, the company launched Polars Cloud this month, a managed data platform that allows users to perform large-scale queries in the cloud.
“In the open source community, jokes can be rewritten with rust and it’s getting better,” said Zhenya Loginov, partner at Accel, who led the funding round. “The reason it’s a joke is that it’s not a real sustainable benefit, it needs to be done more.”
For Vink and his co-founder, former Xomnia CTO Chiel Peters, this means building products around the tools, such as those distributed by Polars Cloud and Polars. The latter is a distributed engine that supports use cases that contain petabytes of data rather than small data sets, and is currently available in public beta. Building new features is something that most funds go forward, Vink said.
Once Polars is distributed, the startup aims to challenge Apache Spark.
For Polar, chasing pandas’ market share was enough to secure a $4 million seed round in 2023, led by Bain Capital. However, Panda remains open source without a dedicated commercial platform, with Polars surpassing 24 million downloads, but the way to return is unknown.
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Loginov called this a “more interesting” second market, but agreed that the value of Polars fills the scale gap between Pandas and Spark. “When we can now work with datasets of all sizes and complexity, we solve a lot of challenges for many companies. So we felt that the ultimate market is potentially very large,” Loginov said.
Polars claims that the core products are already used in the production of financial, life sciences and logistics as a whole. Still, the distributed Polars Cloud and Polars are opening new chapters for the company.
For other founders who want to turn open source projects into commercial ventures, Lognov points to an important lesson from Vink’s Journey. “Polar managed to do so because he really dealt with a big problem. He found a niche with a mile old technology available today, so I recommend finding a big problem.”
