SG startup Dozer raises $3m in Surge-led Seed round

Dozer, a Singapore-based open-source data infrastructure platform that simplifies the creation of highly scalable real-time data APIs, has raised US$3 million in seed funding.

Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia’s Surge led the round, with participation from Gradient Ventures and January Capital.

The funding will be used to scale Dozer’s product and engineering teams. The company has emerged from stealth mode, and its platform is now openly accessible to developers.

As companies increasingly digitize, many are also becoming data companies. This has led to a significant focus on data engineering and the rise of the ‘Modern Data Stack’ (MDS).

The market initially centered on data warehouses such as Snowflake, Big Query, and Redshift, but investments have since expanded to ingestion/data integration, data transformation, data visualization, and more. Despite significant investment into what is now a multi-billion dollar market, the impact has not extended beyond IT users in a meaningful way.

Dozer believes that creating data APIs should be effortless and straightforward. The platform offers a plug-and-play data infrastructure backend that enables engineers to easily connect with any data source, combine them, and create real-time APIs to build end-user applications in minutes.

The startup connects with a wide variety of databases such as Postgres and MySQL, data warehouses such as Snowflake, and even the Ethereum blockchain ledger, allowing engineers to aggregate data across multiple sources to glean real-time insights and build features for customer personalization.

Dozer is built in Rust, a low-level programming language that is well known for its fast performance and memory safety, and can be extended to support new data sources or transformations.

The company’s co-founders, Matteo Pelati and Vivek Gudapuri, bring over 20 years of software and data engineering experience. Matteo has been part of data engineering leadership teams and built real-time data platforms at some of the most data-driven yet architecturally complex organizations, including Goldman Sachs, DBS, and DataRobot.

Vivek comes with deep product and platform engineering expertise, having led technical teams and scaled platforms in fast-growing technology companies like PaySense and Yojee.

Dozer offers a novel approach to building data APIs and plays in a potentially large Total Addressable Market (TAM). Companies will continue to invest in real-time, data-driven products that offer users a 10x experience, and the picks & shovels that enable this will unlock tremendous value.