{"id":92643,"date":"2025-09-29T13:20:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-29T13:20:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/92643\/"},"modified":"2025-09-29T13:20:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T13:20:07","slug":"the-startup-behind-open-source-tool-polars-raises-21m-from-accel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/92643\/","title":{"rendered":"The startup behind open source tool Polars raises $21M from Accel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Polars<\/a>, the Amsterdam-based company behind the popular open source project of the same name<\/a>, has raised \u20ac18 million (about $21 million) in a Series A round led by Accel, with participation from Bain Capital Partners and angel investors. But while raising this kind of money is the dream of many developers, its creator Ritchie Vink didn\u2019t set out to do so.<\/p>\n

It all started as a pet project during Covid. Frustrated with the limitations of Pandas<\/a>, a tool for organizing and working with data tables, Vink decided to build a better query engine in Rust. Fast-forward five years, and Polars is today widely used by data scientists and teams for its ability to process data much faster<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This combination of performance and popularity was what caught venture investors\u2019 attention, but the Series A was spurred by Polars\u2019 roadmap for becoming a scalable business. Two years after launching as a company<\/a>, the company in February launched Polars Cloud<\/a>, a managed data platform that lets users run queries in the cloud at scale.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the open-source community, the joke is that you can rewrite anything in Rust and it becomes better,\u201d said Accel partner Zhenya Loginov, who led the funding round. \u201cThe reason that it\u2019s a joke is that it is not a real sustainable advantage, and you need to do a lot more.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Viks and his co-founder, former Xomnia CTO Chiel Peters, doing more means building products around the tool, like Polars Cloud and Polars Distributed. The latter is a distributed engine that will support use cases involving petabytes of data, rather than small datasets, and is currently available in public beta. Building the new feature is what most of the funding will go towards, Vink said.<\/p>\n

With Polars Distributed, the startup aims to challenge Apache Spark, whose creators founded Databricks. <\/p>\n

For Polars, going after Pandas\u2019 market share <\/strong>was enough to secure a $4 million seed round<\/a> led by Bain Capital in 2023. But Pandas remains open source without a dedicated commercial platform, and even though Polars has surpassed 24 million downloads<\/a>, the path to returns would be unclear if it weren\u2019t for Polars Distributed and the ability to scale up from a single machine to a managed cluster.<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

While Loginov referred to this as a \u201cmore interesting\u201d second market, he agreed with Vink that the value of Polars is in closing the scale gap between Pandas and Spark. \u201cIf you go into being able to process data sets of any size and complexity, you\u2019re solving a lot of challenges for a lot of enterprises. So we felt that the ultimate market is potentially extremely large,\u201d Loginov said.<\/p>\n

Polars claims the core product is already used in production across finance, life sciences, and logistics. Still, Polars Cloud and Polars Distributed are opening a new chapter for the company.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For other founders hoping to turn open-source projects into commercial ventures, Loginov points to a key lesson from Vink\u2019s journey. \u201cPolars became successful because it addressed a really big problem \u2014 he found a niche where the technology available today is just outdated by a mile. So I would suggest finding a large problem.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Polars, the Amsterdam-based company behind the popular open source project of the same name, has raised \u20ac18 million…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":92644,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[22606,16135,18,4500,19,17,929,60135,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-92643","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-accel","9":"tag-data-processing","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-exclusive","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-open-source","15":"tag-polars","16":"tag-technology"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}