Firebolt
Firebolt is a cloud data warehouse founded in 2019 by Eldad Farkash, Saar Bitner, and Ariel Yaroshevich, all former Sisense engineers based in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Profile
Provides a cloud analytical database for engineers running sub-second analytics and AI applications at scale, competing on latency and price-performance.
Firebolt is a cloud data warehouse founded in 2019 by Eldad Farkash, Saar Bitner, and Ariel Yaroshevich, all former Sisense engineers based in Tel Aviv, Israel. The company has raised $269 million across three rounds—Series A ($37M, December 2020), Series B ($127M, June 2021), and Series C ($100M, January 2022, $1.4B valuation)—backed by Alkeon Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and other institutional investors. By 2024, Firebolt had generated $40.4M in revenue with 12 enterprise customers and employed roughly 189 people.
The company positions itself as an alternative to Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift for teams needing sub-second query latency at petabyte scale. Its architecture decouples metadata, storage, and compute, supports Apache Iceberg tables, and offers ACID transactions with snapshot isolation. In September 2024, Firebolt released a next-generation cloud data warehouse after five years of development.
In March 2025, it published the FireScale benchmark, claiming 120ms latency at 2,500 queries per second with 8x better price-performance than Snowflake and 90x better than BigQuery. Leadership changes came in January 2025 when Hemanth Vedagarbha (former president at Oracle and Confluent) joined as President, followed by his appointment to CEO in September 2025, with founder Farkash transitioning to Chairman. The company is expanding into Asia-Pacific with a hub in Bengaluru led by Sandeep Mathur (former Oracle India MD). A September 2022 layoff affected an undisclosed portion of staff, attributed to economic headwinds despite $200M+ in reserves—an episode that raised questions about capital efficiency and market timing.
Who buys this
- AdTech and MarTech firms needing high-concurrency analytics (Bigabid, Similarweb)
- Life sciences and healthcare organizations processing massive transactional datasets (IQVIA)
- Gaming and entertainment platforms serving real-time data to end users (Lurkit)
- FinTech and banking institutions requiring real-time analytics and audit trails (Visdum)
- Aviation and logistics companies with historical data volumes in the hundreds of billions of rows (WINGX)
Publicly disclosed clients
- Similarweb
- IQVIA
- Bigabid
- WINGX
- Lurkit
- Visdum
- Sweet Security
Strengths and what to watch
Strengths
- Latency and concurrency: Achieves sub-100ms queries at 2,500+ simultaneous queries per second, addressing a specific gap Snowflake and BigQuery do not target.
- Price-performance at scale: Customers report 8x lower cost than Snowflake and 90x lower than BigQuery on comparable benchmarks; IQVIA queries 1B patient records in milliseconds.
- Modern architecture: Postgres-compatible SQL, Apache Iceberg support, ACID transactions, and decoupled compute/storage allow engineering teams to avoid lock-in and use commodity tools.
Watch for
- Capital efficiency and land grab timing: $269M raised but only $40.4M revenue in 2024 and 12 named customers suggest a slow GTM relative to funding. September 2022 layoffs despite $200M cash raised questions about execution discipline.
- Competitive moat and pricing power: Performance benchmarks favor Firebolt but depend on workload characteristics (low-latency, high-concurrency). On batch analytics, Snowflake and BigQuery remain cheaper; pricing sustainability unclear if market commoditizes latency.
- Leadership and execution risk: Founder CEO Eldad Farkash transitioned to Chairman in September 2025 after Hemanth Vedagarbha ascended from President. Employee sentiment on Glassdoor (3.2/5 stars, 36% positive outlook) reflects prior communication breakdowns and compensation cuts; new leadership faces retention and trust rebuild.
Recent moves
Key Information
- Industry
- Data Warehouse
- Founded
- 2019
- Employees
- 228
- Headquarters
- Tel Aviv, Israel
- Country
- United States
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Firebolt?
Firebolt is a cloud analytical database founded in 2019 by three former Sisense engineers, specializing in sub-second analytics queries at petabyte scale. It decouples compute, storage, and metadata, supports Apache Iceberg tables, and offers ACID transactions with Postgres-compatible SQL for engineering teams building real-time analytics and AI applications at scale.
How fast is Firebolt?
Firebolt achieves sub-100 millisecond query latency at 2,500+ simultaneous queries per second, according to its FireScale benchmark released in March 2025. This performance is specifically optimized for high-concurrency analytical workloads. The benchmark documents 120ms latency at 2,500 QPS, demonstrating its advantages for real-time analytics serving large concurrent user bases.
Is Firebolt cheaper than Snowflake?
Firebolt's FireScale benchmark claims 8x lower costs than Snowflake on comparable workloads. However, this advantage applies specifically to high-concurrency, sub-second analytics. For batch processing and traditional data warehouse workloads, Snowflake often remains competitive or cheaper. Pricing sustainability depends on market commoditization of latency features.
What companies use Firebolt?
Firebolt serves seven publicly named customers: AdTech firms Bigabid and Similarweb, life sciences company IQVIA, gaming platform Lurkit, FinTech firm Visdum, aviation logistics company WINGX, and cybersecurity firm Sweet Security. These segments leverage Firebolt for high-concurrency real-time analytics, transactional processing, and historical data at scale.
How does Firebolt compare to BigQuery?
Firebolt's FireScale benchmark claims 90x lower costs than BigQuery on comparable analytical workloads. Firebolt targets sub-second, high-concurrency scenarios. BigQuery excels at batch processing, data exploration, and enterprise-scale analytics. Choose Firebolt for low-latency user-facing analytics; choose BigQuery for traditional data warehouse workloads and ML integration.
Who leads Firebolt?
Eldad Farkash, Firebolt's founder and original CEO, transitioned to Chairman in September 2025. Hemanth Vedagarbha, the former president at Oracle and Confluent, assumed the CEO role to accelerate go-to-market expansion globally. Employee sentiment remains cautious (3.2/5 stars on Glassdoor), reflecting trust-building needed after 2022 layoffs and compensation restructuring.
How Firebolt compares
Direct head-to-head against 3 competitors. Picked by 7wData.
Firebolt
- Positioning
- Provides a cloud analytical database for engineers running sub-second analytics and AI applications at scale, competing on latency and price-performance.
- Customer segments
- AdTech and MarTech firms needing high-concurrency analytics (Bigabid, Similarweb)
- Strengths
- Latency and concurrency: Achieves sub-100ms queries at 2,500+ simultaneous queries per second, addressing a specific gap Snowflake and BigQuery do not target.
- Watch for
- Capital efficiency and land grab timing: $269M raised but only $40.4M revenue in 2024 and 12 named customers suggest a slow GTM relative to funding. September 2022 layoffs despite $200M cash raised questions about execution discipline.
- Recent moves
- Firebolt appoints Hemanth Vedagarbha as CEO; founder Eldad Farkash becomes chairman
ClickHouse Cloud
- Positioning
- Open-source OLAP database-as-a-service targeting sub-second query speed for AdTech, FinTech, and AI infrastructure workloads.
- Customer segments
- AdTech, FinTech, and AI platform teams at mid-market to enterprise scale requiring high-concurrency, real-time analytics.
- Strengths
- Column-store OLAP architecture validated at Anthropic, Tesla, and Lyft; 3,000-plus paying cloud customers with 250 percent ARR growth year-over-year.
- Watch for
- Cloud costs spike unpredictably under autoscaling; community benchmarks put self-managed ClickHouse 30-50 percent cheaper on stable production workloads.
- Recent moves
- January 2026: raised $400M Series D led by Dragoneer, acquired LLM observability startup Langfuse, and launched a native Postgres service.
SingleStore
- Positioning
- Unified OLTP-plus-OLAP database for organizations running real-time operational analytics and AI applications without separate ETL infrastructure.
- Customer segments
- Financial services, analytics, and SaaS enterprises needing simultaneous real-time ingest and sub-second query; data and engineering buyer.
- Strengths
- Three-tier architecture combining in-memory row store, column store, and object store for real-time ingest alongside analytical queries.
- Watch for
- September 2025 PE buyout by Vector Capital raises concern about product investment pace under private equity ownership constraints.
- Recent moves
- September 2025: Vector Capital completed approximately $500M growth buyout, transitioning SingleStore from venture-backed to private equity ownership.
Imply
- Positioning
- Managed cloud platform built on Apache Druid for sub-second analytics on streaming and event data at high concurrency.
- Customer segments
- AdTech, media, and SaaS companies building analytics applications requiring real-time event ingestion and millisecond rollup queries at scale.
- Strengths
- Founded by original Apache Druid creators; native real-time event ingestion with pre-aggregation delivers millisecond rollup queries at scale.
- Watch for
- No funding round since May 2022 Series D; four years without a raise raises questions about growth runway and product investment.
- Recent moves
- September 2025: launched Imply Lumi, a decoupled observability data layer targeting log, metric, and trace analytics workloads.
Sources
- www.firebolt.io — Current product positioning, capabilities (Postgres SQL, Iceberg support, ACID transactions, AI agent support), and named customers (Similarweb, Bigabid, IQVIA, Sweet Security)
- techcrunch.com — Series C funding ($100M, January 2022, $1.4B valuation), founders (Eldad Farkash CEO, Saar Bitner COO, Ariel Yaroshevich), prior roles at Sisense, total funding of $269M, Mosha Pasumansky CTO hire from Google BigQuery
- www.businesswire.com — FireScale benchmark announcement March 2025, performance claims (120ms at 2,500 QPS, 8x better than Snowflake, 18x better than Redshift, 90x better than BigQuery)
- www.prnewswire.com — Hemanth Vedagarbha CEO appointment September 2, 2025; Eldad Farkash transitions to Chairman; quote from Farkash on go-to-market results
- www.businesswire.com — Hemanth Vedagarbha appointment as President January 2025; former roles at Oracle and Confluent
- www.prnewswire.com — Sandeep Mathur APAC Managing Director appointment February 2025; Bengaluru hub establishment
- www.calcalistech.com — September 2022 layoff; CEO Eldad Farkash statement on economic headwinds; company had $200M+ in reserves; 200+ employees across 20+ countries
- www.glassdoor.com — Employee sentiment: 3.2/5 star rating, 40 reviews, 42% would recommend, 36% positive business outlook, concerns about management communication and compensation
- getlatka.com — 2024 revenue $40.4M, 12 customers
- www.firebolt.io — Named customers and case studies: Similarweb, IQVIA, Bigabid, WINGX, Lurkit, Visdum, Sweet Security and their use cases