Read the exclusive pitch deck data startup Ryft used to raise $8 million, led by Index and Bessemer

Ryft, a data management startup, has emerged from a 10-month stealth phase, successfully raising $8 million in seed funding. This investment round was co-led by Index Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners, with additional contributions from members of founding teams at Wiz and Eon. According to co-founder and CEO Yossi Reitblat, Ryft aims to deliver a more adaptable data product compared to major cloud providers such as Snowflake, Databricks, Microsoft, AWS, and Google. In today's AI-driven landscape, where data plays a crucial role in developing new models, companies prefer not to be tied down to a single vendor's capabilities. "They want to be able to mix and match," Reitblat explained. Ryft specializes in data optimization, compliance, disaster recovery, and governance, enabling customers to maintain ownership of their data and utilize it with various tools, including those designed for creating AI applications. The company's services are utilized by firms in sectors such as finance, e-commerce, adtech, gaming, and cybersecurity. Founded by three high school friends—Reitblat, CTO Yuval Yogev, and VP of Research and Development Guy Gadon—Ryft was born out of their experiences as software engineers in the Israel Defense Forces, where they developed data software. Currently, the New York-based startup employs 13 team members. The team has built Ryft on top of Apache Iceberg, an open-source analytic table technology developed by Netflix. The company generates revenue through an annual fee based on the volume of data it manages. The new funding will be directed towards expanding the engineering team, enhancing sales initiatives, and introducing new products to the market.