Data flow automation engine Prefect raises $32M

Dataflow automation startup Prefect today announced it has raised $32 million in a series B funding round led by Tiger Global. The organization says it will use the capital to additional create its platform, attract talent, and assistance its developing neighborhood of customers.

When McKinsey surveyed 1,500 executives across industries and regions in 2018, 66% stated addressing expertise gaps connected to automation and digitization was a “top 10” priority. Salesforce’s current Trends in Workflow Automation report located that 95% of IT leaders are prioritizing automation and 70% of execs are seeing the equivalent of more than 4 hours saved per employee each and every week. Moreover, according to market place analysis firm Fact.MR, the adoption of business enterprise workflow automation at scale could develop a market place chance worth more than $1.6 billion in between 2017 and 2026.

Prefect, which was founded in 2018, gives a platform that can create, run, and monitor up to millions of information workflows and pipelines. The company’s hybrid execution model keeps code and information private though taking benefit of a managed orchestration service. Customers can use Prefect for scheduling, error handling, information serialization, and parameterization, leveraging a Python framework to combine tasks into workflows and then deploy and monitor their execution by way of a dashboard or API.

Prefect prospects can style their workflows with a framework referred to as Core, which sends metadata to Prefect’s cloud in order to register a flow for scheduling. Flow updates are asynchronously sent to the cloud as metadata, making sure Prefect can not view the content of the flows themselves.

Hybrid engine

Founder and CEO Jeremiah Lowin says the important to Prefect’s cloud hybrid execution model lies in agents — tiny open supply applications that can launch flows into any atmosphere. Agents can stream true-time state updates and kick off new runs, with an API to query information as properly as join, filter, sort, and transform it.

Prefect’s scheduler service gives solutions that permit for per-run alterations, and it lets customers label flows so they’re picked up by agents with matching labels to assistance numerous environments. Prefect can start off, pause, and resume tasks at any time, permitting manual actions like critique and approval, and it can give flows access to sensitive details at runtime, such as API keys or passwords.

If a process crashes unexpectedly, Prefect can restart it autonomously by way of specific “Lazarus” agents. And the platform alerts stakeholders when an agent goes offline, exposing logs for streaming, filtering, and looking.

Lowin says Prefect had a banner year in 2020, with 130% quarter-more than-quarter usage development given that February 2020. The organization lately announced a relationship with Microsoft for Startups to advance dataflow automation, and it claims its platform is now processing 25 million tasks per month and 2 million workflows per month.

Prefect’s achievement aligns with broader sector trends in digital transformation. According to McKinsey, information flows have raised the worldwide gross domestic item by at least 10% more than a decade. The worth totaled $7.8 trillion in 2014 alone, contributing to financial development mostly by raising productivity.

Market Research Future predicts the worldwide information analytics market place alone will be valued at more than $132 billion by 2026. A variety of organizations can use information to enhance their advertising tactics, improve their bottom line, personalize their content, and far better comprehend their prospects. In truth, corporations that use significant information improve their earnings by an typical of 8%, according to a survey carried out by BARC analysis.

Bessemer Venture Partners also participated in Prefect’s most current funding round. This brings the Washington, D.C.-based company’s total raised to date to more than $46.7 million.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz