Four McLaren F1 engineers raise £11m for startup

investments

Quix, a platform for building and running event-driven data applications, has raised £11 million.

The company was founded by four former engineers at the McLaren Formula 1 team, a sport in which success is based on a team’s ability to make decisions in milliseconds.

Increasing digitization of enterprise processes and consumer products has made companies awash with data. From wearables and gaming to financial services and e-commerce, more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created every day.

The growing value of processing data immediately has made organizations wake up to the complexity of streaming data technologies, with industry-leading companies often investing 3-5 years to build in-house capabilities.

Quix has developed a high-performance, scalable platform that solves a clear business challenge: processing data in real-time to derive actionable insights. It claims to empower organizations to build data apps in weeks rather than years by providing dev teams with the tools, infrastructure and integrations they’d otherwise have to build themselves.

Core to Quix’s innovative strategy is a modular architecture, meaning that customers are not locked into any cloud vendor, infrastructure, or technology. The team has also made an intentional choice to focus on Python – a language that supports deeper analytics, machine learning and automation use cases.

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The Series A funding round led by MMC Ventures, with participation from existing investors Project A Ventures and Passion Capital.

“Many companies are struggling to combine raw technologies like Kafka into real-time data capabilities,” said co-founder Mike Rosam. “Whilst this is possible for the world’s leading tech companies, most struggle to find the talent and time to deliver real-time applications.

“This new capital will fuel our mission to simplify event-driven data engineering so that more companies can build modern data-intensive apps.”

Oliver Richards, partner at MMC Ventures, said: “We have been doing an increased amount of research in the data infrastructure space, it is clear that there is a growing demand for real-time streaming data, both across consumer and B2B use cases.

“When we first met Mike and the Quix team, it was clear that they deeply understood this challenge from their time at the McLaren F1 team, where they built streaming technology to feed race car data from the track to the analytics team.

“Given our relevant experience in the space – with Snowplow and Ably in particular – Quix is ​​a fantastic addition to MMC’s portfolio and we are excited to help them deliver reliable and scalable data applications.”

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