Arcion plans to expand their sales force this year with their just-announced A funding round, but the channel is critical for them given that they have little internal sales resources.
Gary Hagmueller, Arcion’s CEO
Late last week, San Mateo CA-based Arcion formally launched their cloud-native, zero-code data mobility platform, which they see as a distinctive offering which will facilitate interconnection of the $125 billion cloud data ecosystem with transactional databases and cloud warehouses. Arcion also announced that it had secured $13 million in Series A funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with Bessemer Vice President Sakib Dadi joining the Arcion board of directors. Strategic investor Databricks also participated in the round. The new funds will be used to expand Arcion’s sales, marketing and R&D efforts.
Arcion is a rebranding of a former company known as Blitzz – but the companies are as different as night and day. Blitzz marketed itself as an intelligent video engagement platform and collaboration app, to allow businesses to provide customers with exceptional, personalized support.
“We started raising funding in late 2017 in a pre-seed round, so have been around for a while,” said Gary Hagmueller, who was recently named CEO to scale the company, as he has done with others during his career. The company has now formally launched its new and much more ambitious platform, and has a new name.
“We found that somebody else had already done Blitzz with two zs,” he noted.
Arcion’s new offering is a cloud-native, zero-code data mobility platform designed to interconnect the cloud data ecosystem with transactional databases and cloud warehouses.
Lots of companies do something similar, and Hagmueller essentially grouped them into two buckets.
“The first is people who do things that connect SaaS applications, taking them out of Salesforce and others,” he said. “They give you events in real time, but they don’t get into what group number two does.”
That second group is data capture solutions, like Oracle Golden Gate.
“These do that job quite well,” Hagmueller said, but they were not built to be scalable or to cover open ecosystems outside of their own vendor.”
Hagmueller said that Arcion fits into a third bucket.
“We have the ease of use of the first, and we address the second because we have invested heavily In enterprise data capture, because most of our customers want to consume us on Snowflake or Databricks,” he indicated. “For that, you need something scalable.”
Hagmueller noted that it took about four years for the company to build this platform.
“Almost every one on the team has built a database or its tissue,” he said. “Usually, the first group doesn’t deal with databases at all.”
The platform comes with a library of more than 20 pre-built data connectors, enterprise-grade change data capture (CDC), and distributed cloud-native architecture.
Hagmueller summed up Arcion’s overall Go-to-Market strategy.
“I spent 10 years in companies that sold AI or machine learning to large companies,” he said. “They often had to run scripts that broke. This is a new category. From traditional ETL [Extract, Transform, Load] we take the T out. Companies that do the T well don’t do the E and L. For companies who now use companies like Databricks, Imply and Snowflake for their data, we intend to provide connectivity regardless of the source or the target.”
Hagmueller said that he sees three channels being part of the Go-to-Market. One is the strategic partners, the destination vendors like Databricks, who provide data warehousing and data lakes in the cloud.
“A second channel will be those vendors like Looker and Tableau who provide us with pull-through demand,” he noted. “The third is VARs and ISVs who are helping companies with digital transformation. One of these partners walked us into a large financial services company in a significant project doing replication through a more modern architecture. Banks want to do this with migration and replication, but we are in the very early days of doing it.
“I’ve never seen a company with this stage with such strong partner buy-in,” Hagmueller continued. “We have the same interests, as their customers struggle to get transactional data out of databases. In the long term, a direct business will also kick in here.”
It is still early days for the company, and they are still staffing up.
“We are at about 25 people currently – almost all in engineering,” Hagmueller said. “There is only one marketing and one sales person. The new infusion of cash will see the company double over the next year’s time frame.”
He noted that while the company had absolutely no sales or marketing capacity at all until two months ago, they still managed to sell.
“About half of the revenue came from the strategic partners, and the rest came through people the founders knew.”
