The Faktory is a private tech startup accelerator, incubator and venture capital seed fund founded by Pierre L’Hoest, the Belgian entrepreneur renowned for starting EVS Broadcast Equipment, an international TV slow motion technology valued at 422M€ in 2016.   The Faktory has invested in 11 companies with a capital of over 4.5M€ under management. Our companies offer products and services to international niche markets in the areas of consumer electronics, high-technology, gaming and apps, drones, SaaS and IoT products. Our team and mentors come from all walks of life with professional experience in different countries. Furthermore, we partner with Boldstart Ventures, based in NYC, who, with over 30 years of venture tenure, oversaw the successful exits such as Divide (acquired by Google), GoInstant (acquired by Salesforce) and Rapportive (acquired by Linkedin).  Based on efficient approaches like the Lean Startup and Business Model Canvas, a 360° analysis is applied to the most promising ideas. The objective is to help startups to grow by identifying and validating market niches, customer-centric development and by providing the means necessary to deploy and launch their businesses successfully.

The Faktory Fund

Alchemist is a venture-backed accelerator focused on accelerating the development of seed-stage ventures that monetize from enterprises (not consumers). CB Insights rated Alchemist the top accelerator in 2016 based on the median funding rates of its grads (YC was #2). The accelerator’s primary screening criteria is on teams, prioritizing having distinctive technical co-founders. The organization provides seed investment into companies it admits (typically $36K), and provides founders a structured path to traction, fundraising, mentorship, and community throughout a 6-month program. The company's backers include many of the top corporate and VC funds in the Valley -- including Khosla Ventures, DFJ, Cisco, GE, next47(Siemens), and Salesforce, among others—the accelerator seeds around 75 enterprise-monetizing ventures/year. Notable alumni include LaunchDarkly, Rigetti Quantum Computing, mPharma, Matternet, and Mightyhive.

Alchemist Accelerator

NetApp Excellerator program is designed to help start-ups create innovative, world-class products and solutions that are market ready.

NetApp Excellerator

Kensu

Our data observability solution offers companies the opportunity to monitor their data usage and scale with more data projects, thanks to its unique platform and ''Data Observability Driven Development'' (DODD) method. Our disruptive approach goes further than simply scanning data sources: it monitors data where and when it is being used by your applications, so users are always in control and can ''Trust what they deliver''.

Kensu offers a data observability platform designed to enhance data reliability and trust. The platform provides real-time monitoring of both static and dynamic data, enhancing data infrastructure management and decision-making by offering visibility into data flows, tracking data lineage, detecting anomalies, and ensuring data quality across the entire data ecosystem.

Data Infrastructure & Analytics

Kensu Named Challenger and Fast Mover in GigaOm Radar Report for Data Observability

Kensu offers a data observability platform designed to enhance data reliability and trust. The platform provides real-time monitoring of both static and dynamic data, enhancing data infrastructure management and decision-making by offering visibility into data flows, tracking data lineage, detecting anomalies, and ensuring data quality across the entire data ecosystem.Key customers and partnershipsKensu's client base includes various industries, with notable usage by financial institutions. These clients have implemented Kensu's solutions to enhance their data management processes.Kensu’s technology partners as of November 2023 included Snowflake, Databricks, Datadog, Collibra, dbtLabs, and several others. Its platform integrates with a range of cloud providers and data and analytics tools as well, such as Airbyte, Airflow, Azure, Fivetran, Informatica, Python, and Talend.

Fivetran is a cloud-based automated data integration platform that enables businesses to move data from various sources, including SaaS applications, databases, and files, into data warehouses, data lakes, and other destinations. The company's platform offers multiple deployment models to meet diverse business needs, ranging from stringent security requirements to maintaining on-premises databases even after partial cloud migration.The company's data movement platform is designed to automate and streamline the process of extracting, loading, and transforming (ELT) data, empowering organizations to focus on data-driven insights and decision-making. With real-time analytics, database replication, AI workflows, and cloud migrations facilitated by Fivetran, thousands of customers worldwide can leverage the platform to drive business growth.Fivetran's core offering revolves around its connector library, which supports over 500 data sources, including SaaS applications, databases, ERPs, and files. These connectors enable automatic, reliable, and secure data movement, regardless of whether the data resides on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment. The platform's scalable architecture allows businesses to seamlessly add or remove data sources as their needs evolve.To enhance the usability and accessibility of the ingested data, Fivetran employs a normalized schema approach. By delivering data in a normalized format, the platform enables customers to remix and reshape the data according to their specific requirements, facilitating efficient data analysis and reporting. Additionally, Fivetran offers pre-built data models and dbt Core integration, empowering customers to create analytics-ready tables tailored to their business use cases, such as analyzing deal opportunities from Salesforce, generating general ledger reports from QuickBooks data, or evaluating return on ad spend across advertising platforms.In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/30203">June 2024</a>, the company launched Managed Data Lake Service to simplify the process of managing data lakes for businesses of any size. Key benefits include the ability to centralize data for insights and convenience. Furthermore, it reduces costs by discontinuing support for legacy data warehouses.In September 2024,&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/33748">Fivetran introduced "Hybrid Deployment",</a> allowing customers to run data pipelines within their environment while managing them through Fivetran's platform. This solution enables enterprises to securely centralize data from various sources, including cloud-based SaaS apps and legacy databases. Fivetran claims Hybrid Deployment offers full visibility of all pipelines from a single interface, enhanced data security, and simplified setup and maintenance.Key customers and partnershipsOver the years, Fivetran has attracted a diverse range of customers across various industries, including ecommerce, finance, technology, and media. Notable clients include Autodesk, Conagra Brands, JetBlue, Lionsgate, Morgan Stanley, and Ziff Davis, among others. These companies leverage Fivetran's platform to streamline their data integration workflows, optimize their analytics capabilities, and gain a competitive edge through data-driven decision-making.To further enhance its offerings and enable seamless integrations, Fivetran has established strategic partnerships with various technology providers, including data warehousing solutions, cloud platforms, and business intelligence tools. For instance, Fivetran collaborates with Databricks, enabling customers to build an open lakehouse with Delta Lake powered by the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. Additionally, Fivetran's integration with Unity Catalog provides out-of-the-box governance and security for Fivetran-generated tables.

Fivetran

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 Domo is a cloud-based analytics platform that enables businesses to connect, transform, and visualize data from various sources. It provides a comprehensive solution for data management, analysis, and visualization, empowering organizations to make data-driven decisions. Domo's platform is designed to foster collaboration, efficient decision-making, and improved business outcomes through its user-friendly interface and powerful data manipulation capabilities.
 
 
 Domo's key offerings include data integration, data warehousing, business intelligence (BI), and intelligent applications. The platform leverages its Adrenaline engine and offers over 1,000 pre-built connectors to extract data from cloud applications, databases, spreadsheets, and other sources. This data is then stored in Domo's internal data warehouse or accessed through federated queries, enabling users to analyze and visualize it using Domo's extensive collection of visualization tools and dashboards.
 
 
 Domo&rsquo;s user experience is designed to be intuitive and accessible, fostering high adoption rates across organizations. Its user-friendly interface, seamless collaboration features, and mobile-first approach contribute to its widespread adoption and ease of use. Domo's platform is built for speed and scalability, allowing organizations to quickly access and analyze even large datasets without experiencing performance issues.
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 Domo serves over 2,300 customers across various industries, including major enterprises such as eBay, Walmart, Cisco, Citibank, HP, The National Geographic Society, Verizon, US Army, Vanguard, Microsoft, IBM, Thomson Reuters, Airbus, Orange, AT&amp;T, Caterpillar, Volvo Cars, and Comcast.
 
 
 The platform has been widely adopted by organizations seeking to leverage data for better decision-making, improved customer insights, and enhanced marketing analytics. Domo has formed strategic partnerships with companies like Regional One Health and Torchy's Tacos, enabling them to leverage Domo's capabilities for healthcare metrics and finance applications, respectively.
 
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Domo

Founded in 2014, Confluent, Inc. is a technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. The company specializes in data streaming platforms, primarily based on Apache Kafka, an open-source project created by Confluent's founders while working at LinkedIn. Confluent offers two main products: Confluent Platform, an on-premise solution, and Confluent Cloud, a fully managed SaaS. These products help organizations harness real-time data streams for various applications, including microservices, Internet of Things (IoT), financial services, fraud detection, and customer analytics.Confluent's primary offering in data infrastructure services is its integration solution, which enables organizations to unify data from disparate sources. The Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud act as clients' central nervous systems, allowing them to connect various IT systems and applications to capture and process real-time data streams. This capability enables businesses to make decisions based on continuously flowing data.In September 2024,&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/33818">Confluent announced upgrades to its Confluent Cloud</a> product, enhancing support for Apache Flink. The updates include support for the Table API, simplifying development for Java and Python users, and private networking support to improve data security. These upgrades aimed to simplify Flink deployments, enhance security, and make it easier for organizations in regulated industries to stream data and integrate it into applications.Key customers and partnershipIn December 2023, Confluent expanded partnerships with MongoDB, Pinecone, Rockset, Weaviate, and Zilliz as part of its "Data Streaming for AI" initiative. These partnerships aimed to provide real-time contextual data from Confluent's platform to partners' vector databases, facilitating the development of AI-powered applications.

Confluent

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 dbt Labs provides an open source data transformation tool that uses analytics engineering. It is aimed at programmers with knowledge of SQL to develop models with SELECT statements, test and document each model, and install safely with Git-enabled version control. The software enables the user to develop faster, work from the same assumptions, deploy with confidence, and&nbsp; ensure low risk with governance and safety. The company also offers dbt Core, which is an open source software for analytics engineers, and dbt Cloud Enterprise for secure, reliable access to data. JetBlue and Domain are some of its clients.
 
 
 
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dbt Labs

Starburst provides an analytics engine that enables organizations to access and analyze distributed data without moving it from its source location. The company's platform is built on Trino (formerly known as Presto), a distributed SQL query engine designed for running interactive analytics queries across various data sources. The platform allows users to query data across multiple databases, data lakes, and data warehouses simultaneously, eliminating the need for costly and time-consuming data centralization. In February 2023, Starburst introduced Warp Speed, a smart indexing and caching solution that accelerates queries up to 7x faster by autonomously identifying and caching frequently used data. The company's software includes two main offerings: Starburst Enterprise for self-managed deployments and Starburst Galaxy, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution launched in 2021 that enables data lake and cross-cloud analytics. In February 2022, Starburst reported tripling its customer base and annual recurring revenue in the previous 12 months.
Key customers and partnerships
Starburst's platform is used by organizations including Zillow, Standard Chartered, Carrefour Brazil, Comcast, DoorDash, VMware, and Condé Nast. The platform helped Priceline reduce data storage costs by 5-10x while AssuranceIQ achieved a 10% increase in conversion rates. Starburst had established partnerships with major cloud platforms including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba Cloud, Red Hat, and HPE. The company also partnered with Red Hat as one of the inaugural members of the Red Hat OpenShift Data Science ecosystem.

Starburst

Solutions to unify data from disparate sources by extracting, transforming, loading, and storing data in a usable form (such as in data warehouses) for further analysis.

Tools to monitor data for quality issues in real-time, as it moves throughout the data pipeline.

Providers of storage solutions that help accelerate data analytics. These include primary storage solutions, such as data warehouses and data lakes, and secondary storage solutions for non-mission-critical data.

Solutions that enable businesses to carry out data processing and create ML models on the underlying data for predictive analysis.

Tools for enterprises to visualize data in a graphical form and obtain insights on the same using AI and natural language processing.

Companies that use GenAI as a core part of their product offering for data infrastructure & analytics.

Leverages GenAI to help organizations extract insights and supports GenAI application development through data preparation

Offers data analytics and storage platforms for business under a B2B SaaS model

These are tools that help prepare data for AI/ML applications

Kensu

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