Our Investment in WarpStream
Summary
By building on top of cloud primitives and focusing on the needs of companies that dont manage their own data centers, WarpStream can create a cheaper, easier, more reliable stream processing system that will unlock so many opportunities for companies to build better applications.During their tenure at Datadog, Richie Artoul and Ryan Worl, the founders of WarpStream, were tasked with replacing Datadogs legacy event analytics system. This is not surprising since Kafka was designed by LinkedIn to run on-premise - so they didnt need to pay a toll for cross-availability zone traffic.Richie and Ryan saw an opportunity to eliminate these fees by removing the need to write data cross-zone. While Richie informed us that he was not excited about revisiting Hyperdash, he mentioned that he was thinking about starting a company alongside Ryan to help any team diagnose performance problems and customer issues by storing and accessing telemetry faster and cheaper.47 emails, several demonstrations, and a few lunches later, we were bought in and poised to invest in WarpTable. We just hoped and prayed that they didnt start a space tourism startup on the blockchain.So when Richie emailed us to say that Ryan was trying to convince him to build a cloud-native replacement for Kafka WarpTable-style, we were in. The history of the Amplify-WarpStream relationship is long; over the past few years, weve had the chance to support Richie and Ryan as theyve developed so many compelling data infrastructure projects.