BREAKING Firebolt reaches $1.4B valuation as a data-warehouse unicorn BENCHMARK FireScale claims 8x better price-performance than Snowflake SCALE Similarweb runs 100 queries/sec on 1PB of production data SPEED Bigabid saw a 400x query performance jump after switching FUNDING ~$269M raised across Series A, B and C AI Sub-second data for the coming wave of AI agents
Company Dossier · Cloud Data Infrastructure

Firebolt

The analytical database for engineers who need answers in milliseconds, not minutes.

2019
Founded
$269M
Raised
$1.4B
Valuation
~200
Employees
Firebolt logo - The Analytical Database for Engineers
FIREBOLT, SAN FRANCISCO. The company's own wordmark - a glitched, red "FIREBOLT" over the line it lives by: an analytical database built for engineers. Founded by three Sisense alumni in 2019.
What it does

A data warehouse rebuilt around one number: latency

Firebolt is a cloud data warehouse - an analytical database that runs SQL queries across terabytes and petabytes of data. Where most warehouses were designed for reports refreshed overnight, Firebolt is engineered to answer complex, Postgres-compatible SQL in sub-second time, for many users at once.

The architecture decouples storage from compute. Data lives in cloud object storage such as Amazon S3, while queries run on separate compute clusters the company calls engines. That separation lets a team scale query capacity independently from data volume - useful when concurrency is spiky and unpredictable, and when the goal is to keep both response time and the cloud bill under control.

"Firebolt has completely redesigned the cloud data warehouse to deliver a super fast, incredibly efficient analytics experience across terabytes and petabytes of data."

The engine reaches millisecond response times through a stack of well-worn database techniques applied together: query optimization, distributed processing, multi-threading, vectorized execution, tiered caching, and resource-aware scheduling and scaling. Firebolt's roots trace back to a heavily optimized fork of the open-source ClickHouse database, from which it has since built its own path.

The thesis
"The coming wave of AI agents makes it critical to query the right data with sub-second latency, cost-efficiently, at massive scale."
- Firebolt, on why it rebuilt the data warehouse
Who uses it & why

Built for data-intensive and customer-facing apps

Firebolt's users are data engineering and product teams who wire analytics directly into their applications - dashboards customers see, features that query data live, and increasingly, AI agents that need the right slice of data on demand.

Reported customer results (source: Firebolt case studies)
Bigabid · query speedup after switching400x
VRIO · query speed increase58x
VRIO · infrastructure cost reduction30%
Similarweb · queries per second on 1PB100/s

Similarweb serves 100 queries per second across more than a petabyte of production data while ingesting five terabytes a day. Bigabid runs a million mobile ad auctions per second. These are the workloads that break conventional warehouses - high concurrency, low latency, no room to wait.

Products & services

The platform

2020

Firebolt Cloud Data Warehouse

The core analytical database. Decoupled storage and compute, Postgres-compatible SQL, sub-second queries and high concurrency over TB-to-PB datasets.

2024

Firebolt Engines

Next-generation compute infrastructure with storage-optimized and compute-optimized families, so teams tune price-performance per workload and scale independently of data volume.

2024

Firebolt SDKs

Developer kits for Python, Node, Java, Go and .NET to embed analytics in applications and automate testing and deployment.

2025

FireScale Benchmark

An open benchmark simulating real-world low-latency, high-concurrency workloads, used to compare Firebolt against Snowflake, Redshift and BigQuery.

How it's different

Where Firebolt sits in the market

The cloud data warehouse market is crowded - Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery and ClickHouse all compete for the same data teams. Firebolt's wedge is narrow and deliberate: price-performance for sub-second, high-concurrency analytics.

FireScale price-performance advantage, per Firebolt's own benchmark (March 2025)
vs Snowflake8x better
vs Amazon Redshift18x better
vs Google BigQuery90x better

These are vendor-published figures - worth reading as Firebolt's claim rather than an independent verdict. Notably, the company released the benchmark so others can run it, a posture that fits its engineering-first framing. The bet underneath is that the next generation of software, powered by AI agents, will demand data access measured in milliseconds, and that today's warehouses were not designed for it.

The money

Funding history

'20

Series A - $37M

Firebolt emerges from stealth to redesign the cloud data warehouse. Backed by Zeev Ventures, TLV Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Angular Ventures.

'21

Series B - $127M

Existing investors return alongside Dawn Capital and K5 Global as Firebolt positions itself against Snowflake on speed and cost.

'22

Series C - $100M at $1.4B

Alkeon Capital leads the round that made Firebolt a unicorn, focused on faster, cheaper analytics on large datasets.

The people & expertise

Three Sisense alumni, one rebuild

Firebolt was founded in 2019 by three leaders from business intelligence company Sisense who had spent a decade close to the problems of analytics at scale - and decided the modern stack was too slow and too expensive.

Co-founder · CEO

Eldad Farkash

Former co-founder and CTO of Sisense. Sets Firebolt's technical direction and product vision.

Co-founder · COO

Saar Bitner

Former GM and CMO at Sisense. Leads operations and go-to-market.

Co-founder · CTO

Ariel Yaroshevich

Former Sisense architect. Leads engineering of Firebolt's query engine.

The expertise is databases and BI, carried over from Sisense - applied to the specific, unglamorous problem of making very large queries very fast, for many users, cheaply.
Business model

How Firebolt makes money

Firebolt is B2B SaaS sold as managed cloud infrastructure. Pricing follows consumption - compute through its engines plus storage - aimed at data engineering teams and companies building customer-facing analytics and AI applications.

Engine traces its ancestry to a forked, heavily optimized version of open-source ClickHouse.
All three co-founders came from Sisense, where the CEO was co-founder and CTO.
Its own tagline is blunt for the category: "The Analytical Database for Engineers."
Publishes benchmarks others can run themselves rather than relying on marketing numbers alone.
Questions

Frequently asked

What does Firebolt do?
Firebolt is a cloud data warehouse - an analytical database that runs fast SQL queries over very large datasets. It decouples storage and compute to deliver sub-second, high-concurrency analytics for data-intensive and AI applications.
Who founded Firebolt and when?
It was founded in 2019 by Eldad Farkash (CEO), Saar Bitner (COO) and Ariel Yaroshevich (CTO), all former leaders at business intelligence company Sisense.
How much funding has Firebolt raised?
Roughly $269 million across Series A ($37M, 2020), Series B ($127M, 2021) and Series C ($100M, 2022), reaching a $1.4 billion valuation.
How is Firebolt different from Snowflake?
Firebolt focuses on low latency and high concurrency. Its FireScale benchmark claims significantly better price-performance for sub-second, customer-facing workloads than Snowflake, Redshift and BigQuery - figures published by Firebolt itself.
Who uses Firebolt?
Data engineering and product teams building analytics into applications. Named customers include Similarweb, Bigabid and VRIO, which use it for large-scale, real-time query workloads.
Watch

Interviews & product demos

Firebolt publishes talks, demos and webinars on its YouTube channel.

Connect

Firebolt on the web

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