# Spiral

> Spiral is a New York-based data infrastructure company building a database reimagined from the ground up for the AI era - what it calls the 'Third Age of Data,' when machines, not humans, are the primary consumers of data. Built on Vortex, an open-source columnar file format donated to the Linux Foundation, Spiral streams data directly from object storage into GPU memory, unifies governance across every data type from tiny embeddings to massive video, and aims to keep expensive GPUs saturated instead of idle. Founded by ex-Palantir and ex-Citadel engineers, it emerged from stealth in September 2025 with $22M in Seed and Series A funding led by General Catalyst and Amplify Partners.

- **Founded:** 2024
- **Headquarters:** New York, United States
- **Founders:** Will Manning (Co-founder & CEO), Rob Kruszewski (Co-founder), Nick Gates (Co-founder)
- **Team size:** ~18 employees
- **Products:** Vortex, Spiral Database
- **Notable:** Emerged from stealth in September 2025 with $22M in Seed and Series A funding from General Catalyst and Amplify Partners., Created Vortex and donated it to the Linux Foundation's LF AI & Data Foundation as an incubation-stage project., Vortex reached ~3,000 GitHub stars and 90+ releases, billed as the fastest open-source columnar file format.

## Products & services

- **Vortex** — An open-source, next-generation columnar file format and compression toolkit, donated to the Linux Foundation (LF AI & Data). Written largely in Rust, it delivers Parquet-equivalent compression with 10-20x faster scans, ~5x faster writes, and up to 100-200x faster random-access reads, plus GPU-native decompression that streams data directly from object storage into GPU memory. Integrates with Arrow, DataFusion, DuckDB, Spark, Pandas and Polars.
- **Spiral Database** — A database purpose-built for the AI era, built on Vortex. Object-store native from day one, it provides GPU-saturating throughput, unified governance across all data types, 'fearless' (granular, time-bounded, audited) permissioning, and a single API for everything from tiny embeddings to massive video files.

## Achievements

- Emerged from stealth in September 2025 with $22M in Seed and Series A funding from General Catalyst and Amplify Partners.
- Created Vortex and donated it to the Linux Foundation's LF AI & Data Foundation as an incubation-stage project.
- Vortex reached ~3,000 GitHub stars and 90+ releases, billed as the fastest open-source columnar file format.
- Benchmarks of up to 100-200x faster random-access reads versus Apache Parquet and direct S3-to-GPU decompression.

## Latest updates

- **2026-06** — Vortex continues rapid open-source development, shipping release 0.74.0 on June 2, 2026 (90+ releases total).
- **2025-09** — Spiral emerged from stealth with $22M in Seed and Series A financing led by General Catalyst and Amplify Partners.
- **2025-08** — The LF AI & Data Foundation announced it would host the Vortex project to power high-performance data access for AI and analytics.

## Links

- Website: https://spiraldb.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/spiraldb
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/SpiralDB
- GitHub: https://github.com/spiraldb

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/spiral
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-12