CASE STUDY
Series A Investment
Background
Treasure Data is a cloud-native Customer and Device Data Processing Platform that translates millions of data points to create individual customer profiles. As active investors in the data space, we are always looking for next generation, innovative companies evolving the sector.
Founders:
The company was founded by Hiro Yoshikawa and Kazuki Ohta in 2012. They were first time entrepreneurs, Hiro having previously worked at Redhat and Mitsui and Kaz straight out of University of Tokyo. We were struck by Kaz’s technical brilliance and ability to build elegant software that was performing at a massive scale with a very small team and Hiro’s knack for closing customers without breaking a sweat.
Connection:
Sierra Ventures Managing Partner Tim Guleri was looking for his next data project after having sold Greenplum to EMC for $400M. Tim met the founders through an introduction from another entrepreneur. Given the fit with our thesis at the time – a cloud company being built by entrepreneurs that could “see around the corner”- the timeline from first meeting to term sheet was a week.
Thesis:
Sierra Ventures has a strong track record in data with investments like Teradata (IPO, $4B market capitalization) and Greenplum (acquired by EMC). We believe that as the importance of data continues to explode, and as the market gets re-invented by Artificial Intelligence, data infrastructure will continue to be a core focus and need.
Investment:
Sierra Ventures led Treasure Data’s Series A round of $7.7M in Q3:13. Over the next three years, the company raised a $15M Series B from Scale Venture Partners and an $11.3M Series C from SBI Ven Capital. Treasure Data had established a leadership position in Customer Data Platform, and was exploring how to become relevant in the Device Data space when we learned that ARM (acquired by Softbank in 2016) was developing a strong vision to turn a very successful semiconductor IP design company into the world leading IoT company. They were passionate about Treasure Data’s technologies and decided to acquire the company for $600M in August 2018.
