Edelbyte exits stealth with $70M to challenge Snowflake and Databricks

$70 million round values Edelbyte at $500 million

Tel Aviv-based Edelbyte Ltd. has left stealth mode, securing $70 million in funding at a $500 million valuation. Sequoia and Quiet Capital led the round, with Greenoaks and Swish Ventures also participating. The cash will fuel hiring and customer acquisition for its AI-first data platform.

Ex-Microsoft engineers behind Azure Data Explorer launch Edelbyte

Edelbyte was founded last year by Avner Aharoni, Evgeney Ryzhyk, Alexander Sloutsky, and Yoni Leibowitz—all alumni of Microsoft’s Azure Data Explorer team. At Microsoft they built Kusto, the engine that powers petabyte-scale telemetry and logs for products like Xbox and Office. That experience underpins Edelbyte’s push to slash query latency for AI workloads.

A Snowflake and Databricks rival built for AI speed

The startup is pitching its platform as a direct rival to Snowflake and Databricks. It handles both classic records and vector embeddings, enabling single deployments of hundreds of petabytes. Edelbyte says it can run ad-hoc queries across multipetabyte datasets in under 100 milliseconds—performance it credits to query federation and automated index tuning.

Several Fortune 500 firms already rely on the platform for petabyte-scale environments, according to the company.

Query federation and automated indexes cut latency

Instead of copying data into a separate processing layer, Edelbyte leaves it in place and ships the query to the storage system. This technique, called query federation, cuts network hops and bandwidth costs. The platform also automates index creation, tailoring shortcuts to the specific access patterns of each application—a job that usually requires manual tuning by data engineers.

Hiring push and Fortune 500 expansion planned

With the new funding, Edelbyte plans to double its headcount and sign more Fortune 500 customers. The four founders remain in day-to-day leadership, with Aharoni serving as CEO.

How Edelbyte stacks up in enterprise AI data

Edelbyte enters a market that is already feeling pressure from AI-driven automation. Databricks recently upgraded its Genie AI assistant so it can autonomously analyze sales results or parse employee surveys without scripts. Unfold, another startup, is taking a different tack by unlocking legacy enterprise data without forcing migrations. Edelbyte, by contrast, is staking its claim with a fresh infrastructure layer that treats AI queries as the default workload.

What this means

Lazyfounder analysis — our interpretation, not reported fact.

The arrival of a team that built Microsoft’s petabyte-scale query engine—and has already signed Fortune 500 users—raises the performance bar for incumbent cloud-data platforms. If Edelbyte’s latency claims hold at scale, enterprises running AI agents against live data could switch without sacrificing speed or budget.

Key takeaways

• Edelbyte’s founders bring proven petabyte-scale engineering from Microsoft, giving it instant credibility with enterprise buyers.
• Sub-100 ms latency on multipetabyte datasets would undercut Snowflake and Databricks on both speed and cost.
• Query federation keeps data in place, reducing cloud bandwidth charges for customers.
• Early Fortune 500 adoption signals product-market fit before the official launch.

Related on Lazyfounder

• Microsoft Corp.
• Snowflake
• Databricks
• Databricks Genie AI now runs survey autopsies and sales postmortems on its own
• Unfold unlocks legacy enterprise data for AI without migrations