Sendence, a new startup based in New York City, announced a $1.5 million seed round today. The company is working on a platform for simplifying deployment of real-time applications.
Investors include Boldstart Ventures, Greycroft, Contour Venture Partners, Notation Capital and Resolute Ventures.
As company CEO and co-founder Vid Jain sees it, more companies are hiring data scientists to develop applications to make decision based on large amounts of data in real time, but the problem becomes dealing with the complexity of running these applications, whether in the cloud or a data center.
What Sendence purports to do is remove all of that complexity by handling the underlying infrastructure plumbing and making it scale automatically whenever new resources are required.
Developers write their applications on the Sendence Wallaroo platform in their language of choice, which Jain says covers most popular choices such as C++ or Python — most anything except Java. The idea is to simply create your application as you normally would, let the system know where your infrastructure resides, and it should deal with launching and managing the application with the correct level of resources — and modifying that over time as requirements change.
These types of applications tend to run across dozens or even hundreds of servers, and employees end up spending a lot of time on the infrastructure side making sure the data isn’t lost, load balancing, all of the infrastructure maintenance and management tasks. He maintains that this a huge waste of time and resources.
Once the application has been launched, you can monitor the performance in an analytics dashboard.
For smaller companies where valuable data scientist time is spent configuring the infrastructure side of things, this could be a boon, but even for larger companies with data engineering and infrastructure teams, it could help automate a lot of activities that require human management today.
“Even if there is a group geared toward data engineering or infrastructure, when [the data scientists] are developing the application, they still need to think about the underlying infrastructure and how to scale it. When you write an application as data scientist on our platform, you don’t have to think about any of that,” Jain said.
The company plans to open source the core technology shortly and are hoping that a community builds around the open source project to help give the product some traction as they head out to market this year.
Sendence currently has 10 employees and several customers in Beta. The company’s short-term goal is to get a couple of paying customers by the end of the year, then begin to grow the company from there.
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