Realtime APIs from Raw Data | tinybird

Introducing Tinybird: Realtime Data Products at Scale

Tinybird is a newly established startup designed to empower developers in the creation of scalable data products. It alleviates the burdens associated with infrastructure management, query optimization, and the common challenges encountered when working with extensive datasets.

The Evolution of Data Interaction

The landscape of data interaction has undergone significant transformation in recent years, largely due to advancements in analytics and business intelligence tools. Many large organizations now utilize data warehouses or data lakes for data storage, aiming to derive valuable insights.

However, the extraction and manipulation of data can often prove to be both expensive and time-consuming. While suitable for generating reports like quarterly presentations, these methods often fall short when it comes to building contemporary web applications and data-driven products.

Tinybird's Core Focus: Realtime Capabilities

“At Tinybird, our primary goal is to assist developers in building data products capable of handling any scale,” explains Jorge Gómez Sancha, co-founder and CEO. “We are particularly focused on delivering realtime functionality.”

The founding team initially collaborated at Carto, where they consistently addressed intricate data challenges. “Each year, we observed a tenfold increase in data volume,” Gómez Sancha recounts, which ultimately sparked the concept behind Tinybird.

The Three Pillars of the Tinybird Product

The Tinybird product is structured around three key components. Initially, users establish a connection between their Tinybird account and their respective data sources. The platform then continuously ingests data from these sources.

Subsequently, data transformation is achieved through the utilization of SQL queries. Both a command-line interface and a web-based interface are provided for query input, allowing for segmentation into multiple steps and comprehensive documentation. Data filtering and sorting are visualized in realtime as queries are developed.

Finally, API endpoints are generated based on these queries. These endpoints function as standard JSON-based APIs, enabling data retrieval within your applications.

Exceptional Speed and Performance

A defining characteristic of Tinybird is its remarkable speed, providing a near-realtime query experience. “Numerous clients are processing over 1.5 trillion rows daily on average through Tinybird, with an ingestion rate of approximately 5 billion rows per day. Others are handling an average of 250 requests per second to our APIs, querying datasets containing several billion rows,” details Gómez Sancha.

The platform leverages ClickHouse under the hood, but this complexity is abstracted away from the user, as Tinybird handles all underlying infrastructure management.

Key Use Cases for Tinybird

Tinybird has identified three particularly promising applications. It can be utilized to deliver in-product analytics, such as providing analytics to customers of a web hosting service or surfacing purchasing data for online stores.

Furthermore, the platform supports operational intelligence, including realtime dashboards for internal company use. These dashboards empower teams to respond swiftly and maintain constant awareness of system status.

Tinybird can also serve as a foundation for automation and complex event processing. For example, it can be employed to construct a web application firewall capable of scanning traffic and reacting in realtime.

Seed Funding and Backers

Tinybird has successfully secured $3 million in seed funding, led by Crane.vc, with participation from prominent business angels including Nat Friedman (GitHub CEO), Nicolas Dessaigne (Algolia co-founder), Guillermo Rauch (Vercel CEO), Jason Warner (GitHub CTO), Adam Gross (former Heroku CEO), Stijn Christiaens (co-founder and CTO of Collibra), Matias Woloski (co-founder and CTO of Auth0), and Carsten Thoma (Hybris co-founder).