Founded by a team of Apache Flink experts, Immerok has just secured €17 million to enhance how businesses use Apache Flink to process data in real-time. The Berlin-based startup is now planning to launch its cloud service and expand the team.
In our digital world, data-driven decisions and insights are ruling the way businesses operate. It’s meant that companies of all sizes increasingly rely on developers to get the data, process and dissect it – which can be a complicated and costly process.
Immerok is a startup embarking on a mission to help companies harness real-time data by providing developers with a platform that can build, run and support Flink-based stream processing applications in the cloud without requiring costly infrastructure expertise. The startup just nabbed a fresh capital injection to scale its product.
The funding
Announcing the close of over €17 million in its seed round, Immerok is now establishing itself as a strong market player in this space. The funding was led by CUSP Capital, 468 Capital, Cortical VC, and Essence VC along with participation from several angel investors, including Apache Flink co-creator, Stephan Ewen.
Stephan Ewen: “The future of Apache Flink is in good hands with Immerok. I spent many years working with the Immerok co-founders. They have deep knowledge of stream processing and cloud-native computing, they build really solid technology, and love working with the community of Flink users. I’m excited to be working with them as an advisor.”
Jan Sessenhausen, General Partner at Cusp Capital: “Using AI to create new real-time customer experiences and increase operational efficiency is at the top of nearly every business leader’s technology agenda today. In order to achieve this, companies require the power to cost-effectively process massive amounts of data in real time, nonstop. Immerok has the vision, the team, and the technology to make this a reality for organizations of all types and sizes, and we are thrilled to partner with them on their journey.”
Harnessing the power of Apache Flink
Cofounded in 2022 by a group of Apache Flink experts including many Committers and PMC members, the Berlin-based team (also operating in the US and elsewhere in Europe), is aiming to help businesses harness the power of Apache Flink – an open source stream processing engine that already powers many of the world’s largest real-time ecommerce, entertainment, and financial services systems.
The Immerok service will make it possible for anyone to leverage the full power of Flink to meet a range of real-time business needs from fast data pipelines and user-facing analytics, to real-time ML/AI and transaction processing.
Holger Temme, Co-founder and CEO of Immerok explained: “Businesses today differentiate themselves by data, so the most strategic IT initiatives right now center around data-intensive applications to support AI/ML models as well as realtime and predictive analytics. Stream processing, and with it Apache Flink, are fundamental to those systems, and until now, organizations have required specialists to build, operate, and scale those streaming applications—specialists that are expensive, and scarce. Immerok will make it easy for organizations to build modern real-time systems by closing the existing gap between stream processing and cloud native applications.”
The company will use the funds to continue to build and launch its fully-managed cloud service for Apache Flink which is now available to Early Access Program users on AWS. Immerok plans to expand support to other cloud platforms in the future. The company will also use the funding to grow its team. Immerok has 20 employees with plans to grow to 30 by year’s end and is hiring for roles in engineering, community relations, and customer success.
Erik de Nooij, Engineering Lead at ING: “ING has been one of the early adopters of Apache Flink. Starting with a POC in 2016 which evolved to a global platform that has become the de facto standard for streaming applications within ING. The next step in this evolution is to adopt a SQL-first approach and a tighter integration with the data lake where machine learning models are being trained. This next step will put ING on a trajectory where analytic capabilities are put in the hands of a wider target audience resulting in more data-driven decisions.”
Florian Leibert with 468 Capital: “Demand for streaming analytics applications is booming. We are excited to be working with Immerok and are confident that they are the right team to bring real-time computing into the mainstream to help businesses revolutionize the way they operate.”
