WarpStream Labs, a firm focused on cloud-native data streaming infrastructure, secured USD 20 million in funding. The round was spearheaded by Greylock and Amplify Partners, with contributions from Angel investors like Ben Sigelman, Spencer Kimball, and Barry McCardel.

The company plans to allocate the capital to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams and invest in new product lines.

WarpStream Labs has developed a novel data streaming system as a cost-effective replacement for Apache Kafka, a widely used but often complex and expensive system. WarpStream Labs claims to make cloud data streaming significantly cheaper and simpler by separating computation from storage.

Analyst QuickTake: Founded by Richard Artoul and Ryan Worl, former engineers at Datadog, WarpStream provides a drop-in replacement for Apache Kafka that runs directly on top of object storage, separating compute from storage. The company offers a "Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)" deployment option, providing the benefits of a fully managed SaaS while reducing costs compared to self-hosting Apache Kafka.