Sumatra Raises Seed Round to Launch Real-time Data Platform

Sumatra, an Austin-based real-time data platform company, announced that it has secured $1.5 million in seed financing led by S3 Ventures with participation from Sentiero Ventures, Data Power Ventures, and AI Sprouts. The funding coincides with General Availability of the company’s SaaS platform, after building in partnership with select pre-launch customers.

With Sumatra’s self-serve tools, data scientists of all skill levels can build their own streaming data pipelines – removing the data engineering dependencies that delay or block most real-time machine learning and analytics deployments – including fraud prevention, cybersecurity, conversion optimization, credit underwriting, and delivery logistics.

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“The platform has enabled our small data science team to ship multiple real-time ML and analytics services. Additionally, with Sumatra, our team is quickly able to leverage the tool for new use cases across the organization,” said Meetesh Karia, CTO and Chief Data Officer of The Zebra, the nation’s leading home and auto insurance comparison site.

Co-Founders Greg Kuhlmann and Lucas McGrew formed Sumatra in 2020 after prior roles spent overcoming the challenges of deploying machine learning in time-critical settings.

“We’ve seen firsthand how much value can be created by real-time ML when teams have the tools to iterate and ship quickly. We also see organizations struggling to build these capabilities in-house, while staying focused on their core business,” said Kuhlmann, the company’s CEO.

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After earning his Ph.D. in Machine Learning from UT Austin, Kuhlmann joined Apple where he led anti-fraud data science teams for its App Store and Apple Pay services, while also helping develop the company’s centralized operational ML platform.   

Having previously built algorithmic financial trading systems, McGrew, who leads Sumatra’s technology development, has designed the platform using a serverless cloud architecture for scalability and easy deployment.

“Sumatra is democratizing real-time machine learning.  Once data scientists of all stripes are empowered to deploy on their own – without having to depend on a costly, over-stretched data engineer – we will see a flurry of new use cases across companies of all types and sizes,” said Eric Engineer, Partner at S3 Ventures, who lead the investment and will join Sumatra’s Board of Directors.