Polars, the Amsterdam-based company behind the popular open source project of the same name, has raised 18 million euros, which is about 21 million dollars, in a Series A funding round. The round was led by Accel, with participation from Bain Capital Partners and several angel investors. While raising this kind of money is a dream for many developers, the creator of Polars, Ritchie Vink, did not originally set out to do so.
The project began as a personal endeavor during the Covid pandemic. Frustrated by the limitations of Pandas, a tool for organizing and working with data tables, Vink decided to build a better query engine using the Rust programming language. Five years later, Polars is now widely used by data scientists and teams for its ability to process data much faster than other tools.
This combination of high performance and growing popularity attracted the attention of venture investors. However, the Series A funding was specifically spurred by Polars’ roadmap for becoming a scalable business. Two years after launching as a company, Polars launched Polars Cloud in February. This is a managed data platform that lets users run queries in the cloud at scale.
An Accel partner, Zhenya Loginov, who led the funding round, commented on the project. He noted that in the open-source community, there is a joke that you can rewrite anything in Rust and it becomes better. He said the reason it is a joke is that it is not a real sustainable advantage on its own, and you need to do a lot more.
For Vink and his co-founder, former Xomnia CTO Chiel Peters, doing more means building commercial products around the core tool. These products include Polars Cloud and Polars Distributed. The latter is a distributed engine that will support use cases involving petabytes of data, rather than just small datasets, and is currently available in public beta. Vink stated that building this new feature is what most of the new funding will be used for. With Polars Distributed, the startup aims to challenge Apache Spark, whose creators went on to found Databricks.
For Polars, initially going after the market share of Pandas was enough to secure a four million dollar seed round led by Bain Capital in 2023. However, Pandas remains an open source project without a dedicated commercial platform. Even though Polars has surpassed 24 million downloads, the path to financial returns would be unclear without products like Polars Distributed that provide the ability to scale up from a single machine to a managed cluster.
Loginov referred to this as a more interesting second market. He agreed with Vink that the value of Polars lies in closing the scale gap between Pandas and Spark. He stated that if you can process data sets of any size and complexity, you are solving a lot of challenges for a lot of enterprises. Therefore, they felt that the ultimate market for Polars is potentially extremely large.
Polars claims its core product is already used in production across various industries, including finance, life sciences, and logistics. Still, the launches of Polars Cloud and Polars Distributed are opening a new chapter for the company.
For other founders hoping to turn open-source projects into commercial ventures, Loginov points to a key lesson from Vink’s journey. He said that Polars became successful because it addressed a really big problem. Vink found a niche where the available technology was outdated by a mile. His suggestion to others is to find a large problem to solve.