Ahana Announces Additional $7.2 Million Funding Led by Liberty Global Ventures and Debuts Free Community Edition of Ahana Cloud for Presto for the Open Data Lakehouse

Only SaaS for Presto now available for free with Ahana Community Edition; Additional capital raise validates growth of the Open Data Lakehouse market


SAN MATEO, Calif., June 16, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ahana, the only Software as a Service for Presto, today announced an additional investment of $7.2 million from Liberty Global Ventures with participation from existing investor GV, extending the company’s Series A financing to $27.2 million. Liberty Global is a world leader in converged broadband, video and mobile communications services. This brings the total amount of funding raised to date to $32 million. Ankur Prakash, Partner, Liberty Global Ventures, will join the Ahana Board of Directors as a board observer. Ahana will use the funding to continue to grow its technical team and product development; evangelize the Presto community; and develop go-to-market programs to meet customer demand.

Ahana also announced today Ahana Cloud for Presto Community Edition, designed to simplify the deployment, management and integration of Presto, an open source distributed SQL query engine, for the Open Data Lakehouse. Ahana Community Edition is immediately available to everyone, including users of the 100,000+ downloads of Ahana’s PrestoDB Sandbox on DockerHub. It provides simple, distributed Presto cluster provisioning and tuned out-of-the-box configurations, bringing the power of Presto to data teams of all sizes for free. Instead of downloading and installing open source Presto software, data teams can quickly learn about Presto and deploy initial SQL data lakehouse use cases in the cloud. Community Edition users can easily upgrade to the full version of Ahana Cloud for Presto, which adds increased security including integration with Apache Ranger and AWS Lake Formation, price-performance benefits including multi-level caching, and enterprise-level support.

“Over the past year we’ve focused on bringing the easiest managed service for Presto to market, and today we’re thrilled to announce a forever-free community edition to drive more adoption of Presto across the broader open source user community. Our belief in Presto as the best SQL query engine for the Open Data Lakehouse is underscored by our new relationship with Liberty Global,” said Steven Mih, Cofounder and CEO, Ahana. “With the Community Edition, data platform teams get unlimited production use of Presto at a good amount of scale for lightning-fast insights on their data.”

“Today we’re seeing more companies embrace cloud-based technologies to deliver superior customer experiences. An underlying architectural pattern is the leveraging of an Open Data Lakehouse, a more flexible stack that solves for the high costs, lock-in, and limitations of the traditional data warehouse,” said Ankur Prakash, Partner, Liberty Global Ventures. “Ahana has innovated to address these challenges with its industry-leading approach to bring the most high-performing, cost-effective SQL query engine to data platforms teams. Our investment in Ahana reflects our commitment to drive more value for businesses, specifically in the next evolution of the data warehouse to Open Data Lakehouses.”

Details of Ahana Cloud for Presto Community Edition, include:

  • Free to use, forever
  • Use of Presto in an Open Data Lakehouse with open file formats like Apache Parquet and advanced lake data management like Apache Hudi
  • A single Presto cluster with all supported instance types except Graviton
  • Pre-configured integrations to multiple data sources including the Hive Metastore for Amazon S3, Amazon OpenSearch, Amazon RDS for MySQL, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, and Amazon Redshift
  • Community support through public Ahana Community Slack channel plus a free 45 minute onboarding session with an Ahana Presto engineer
  • Seamless upgrade to the full version which includes enterprise features like data access control, autoscaling, multi-level caching, and SLA-based support

“Enterprises continue to embrace ‘lake house’ platforms that apply SQL structures and querying capabilities to cloud-native object stores,” said Kevin Petrie, VP of Research, Eckerson Group. “Ahana’s new Community Edition for Presto offers a SQL query engine that can help advance market adoption of the lake house.”

Supporting Resources:
Get Started with the Ahana Community Edition
Join the Ahana Community Slack Channel

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About Ahana

Ahana is the only SaaS for Presto on AWS with the vision to be the SQL engine for the Open Data Lakehouse. Presto, the open source project created by Meta and used at Uber, Twitter and thousands more, is the de facto standard for fast SQL processing on data lakes. Ahana Cloud delivers the easiest Presto SaaS and enables data platform teams to provide high performance SQL analytics on their S3 data lakes and other data sources. As a leading member of the Presto community and Linux Foundation’s Presto Foundation, Ahana is also focused on fostering growth and evangelizing open source Presto. Founded in 2020, Ahana is headquartered in San Mateo, CA and operates as an all-remote company. Investors include GV, Leslie Ventures, Lux Capital, Third Point Ventures, and Liberty Global Ventures. Follow Ahana on LinkedInTwitter and Presto Slack.

Media Contact:
Beth Winkowski
Winkowski Public Relations, LLC
978-649-7189
beth@ahana.io