Polars, the Amsterdam-based company behind the popular open source project of the same name, has raised €18 million (about $21 million) in a Series A round led by Accel, with participation from Bain Capital Partners and angel investors. But while raising this kind of money is the dream of many developers, its creator Ritchie Vink didn’t set out to do so.
It all started as a pet project during COVID. Frustrated with the limitations of Pandas, a tool for organizing and working with data tables, Vink decided to build a better query engine in Rust. Fast-forward five years, and Polars is today widely used by data scientists and teams for its ability to process data much faster.
This combination of performance and popularity was what caught venture investors’ attention, but the Series A was spurred by Polars’ roadmap for becoming a scalable business. Two years after launching as a company, the company this month launched Polars Cloud, a managed data platform that lets users run queries in the cloud at scale.
“In the open source community, the joke is that you can rewrite anything in Rust and it becomes better,” said Accel partner Zhenya Loginov, who led the funding round. “The reason that it’s a joke is that it is not a real sustainable advantage, and you need to do a lot more.”
