Stackwell: A database built for event data

Stackwell is a database designed for event data: clicks, sensor readings, transactions and logs that arrive in vast numbers and are queried by time. It keeps data in a compressed columnar format on inexpensive object storage and still answers most queries in under a second, at a fraction of the cost of a general-purpose warehouse.

Wen and Diego built the first version while working on the data platform at a large ride-hailing company, where event volume was growing faster than any existing tool could handle. We led the seed round in 2018, a few months after the open-source project reached its first thousand production users. Theo has been on the board since.

More than 1,500 companies now run Stackwell in production, and revenue from its managed cloud service has grown by more than 150 per cent a year for three years running.