I’m excited to share that Cube Dev, the company behind Cube.js, has raised a $6.2M round led by Bain Capital Ventures with Eniac Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Betaworks, Overtime.vc, Slack Fund, and other amazing investors (TechCrunch).
This round marks a new chapter in the story of Cube.js, which started back in 2019 and will continue to evolve for years to come. In this post, I want to talk about what it means for Cube.js and its fantastic community.
How We Got Here
Pavel and I open-sourced Cube.js in March 2019. Within months, thousands of developers picked it up and started building applications on top of Cube.js. All of them gave us feedback, spread the word, and participated in the Cube.js community on Slack.
Today, Cube.js has been deployed to more than 70,000 servers in companies worldwide. Businesses trust Cube.js to power mission-critical applications in industries such as healthcare, finance, telecom, software, ad tech, and more. It’s used as a data access layer for complex reporting systems, marketing, and sales tracking, financial budgeting, inventory demand planning, and other analytics software.
But what I'm most excited about is the fantastic community of developers using and contributing to Cube.js. We have more than 100 contributors on GitHub and thousands of community members, almost 2,000 in our Slack alone. Today, I’d like to take a moment and say thank you to everyone who has been helping us along the way: to our users, contributors, and community members. To all of you: thank you for placing your trust in us and believing in our mission.
Maintaining the growth of such magnitude and accommodating the needs of a diverse spectrum of users takes effort and resources. That's why we established Cube Dev, Inc. and raised an investment round.
Why We Raised
In the early days, Pavel and I were able to provide advice and support to every new company starting development with Cube.js. Today, there are thousands of companies already running Cube.js in production and even more actively developing new applications. A team of two isn’t enough to support this growth anymore.
Neither is it enough to make the kinds of changes we’ve long wanted to implement, such as: bring our documentation and overall developer experience to a new level, make external pre-aggregations work across any type and volume of data, support real-time streaming platforms as data sources, and more.
We’ve raised money to build Cube.js faster and keep up with the growth. Today, we're already a team of 9 full-time engineers (and growing!) working on Cube.js and new complementary products and integrations at full speed.
On the frontend and UI layer, we're building more integrations with frameworks, UI kits, and charting libraries while keeping Cube.js visualization-agnostic. We also have big plans for the data management layer. We're working on a better way to build and maintain pre-aggregations, regardless of the underlying data sources. We're optimizing for low-latency querying of aggregated data, fast ingestion, and horizontal scalability.
Not only do we want to evolve Cube.js further as a product, but we also want to ensure it's available to all development teams. So, we need to establish a company to fund the development of Cube.js while keeping it open-source.
What's Next for Cube Dev
At Cube Dev, our mission is to build infrastructure for developing modern analytical applications.
As developers ourselves, we believe that core developer tools must be open-source. That's why we're committed to releasing all the core features as open-source under Apache 2.0 license for the server code and MIT for the frontend.
While keeping Cube.js free and open-source, we are also working on a new commercial offering - Cube Cloud. Our recent learnings showed that even in the cloud era deploying highly reliable and available Cube.js applications is hard. So, we want to focus our commercial offering on helping developers to solve these problems. Cube Cloud will provide additional tools to develop, deploy, and scale Cube.js applications.
Cube Cloud is currently in closed beta, which will expand soon, and it includes a free tier for development and simple productions. So, if you haven't got the chance yet, please sign up to try Cube Cloud out.
Thanks for Your Support
Thank you to every one of you whose invaluable contributions have helped us get where we are today. I’m excited to continue building Cube.js with you in the coming years!
As always, feel free to join our Slack community to share your feedback, ask questions about Cube.js, or just chat with us. See you there!
Also, if you feel the passion for solving hard data problems and want to shape the next generation of analytical applications, we want to hear from you! We're hiring across multiple roles. Check out our careers page for more details.