Firebolt co-founders Eldad Farkash (right) and Saar Bitner. (Photo Firebolt)
Firebolt, an Israeli startup that calls itself the world’s fastest cloud data warehouse, purpose-built for delivering a new grade of analytic experiences over big data, has become the latest Israeli unicorn that has been forced to lay off employees as a result of the continuing global financial crisis. Calcalist reported the news, but said that the company did not reveal how many people were getting fired.
Firebolt hit unicorn status in January of this year when the company raised $100 million in a Series C financing round that gave it a valuation of $1.4 billion. The company has raised $269 million to date and has more than 200 employees in 20 different countries.
The news puts Firebolt in good company. Many Israeli unicorns were forced to make the same move over the summer. And already in September, Hippo Holdings Inc., a home insurance group fired 10% of its workforce or 70 employees. And even Snap Inc., the company behind social media giant Snapchat, let go of about 20% of its total workforce, including 30 people at its research and development center located in Herzliya, Israel.
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Founded in 2018 by CEO Eldad Farkash and COO Saar Bitner, Firebolt boasts that it has “completely redesigned” the cloud data warehouse to deliver a “super fast, incredibly efficient analytics experience across terabytes and petabytes of data.” Leveraging the latest technology stack and the most recent academic research in the big data space, Firebolt declares that the company combines the best of high performance database architecture with the infinite scale of the data lake. Built on a decoupled storage and compute architecture, Firebolt allows its users to easily scale up or down to support any workload.
“The global economic situation requires us to react to the new market conditions,” Firebolt CEO Eldad Farkash told Calcalist. “Even though we are in an excellent position with over $200 million in our account, we are also affected by the slowdown in the market and have therefore decided to cut back certain parts of the company. We plan to continue and invest significantly in product, engineering, and field teams in order to continue to support and build the cloud data warehouse developers love.”
