SDF Labs, a Seattle startup aiming to help software developers manage their enterprise data warehouse systems, this week announced public availability of its product and revealed $9 million in seed funding.
SDF (Semantic Data Fabric) has spent the past two years building what it describes as a SQL compiler and database engine that analyzes SQL code and provides information about how data is being moved across various warehouses, flagging potential errors or bugs in the process.
As companies use more and more data with thousands of SQL statements, the risk of dependency errors may rise — and that’s where SDF wants to help.
“SDF provides a software toolset for faster developer feedback as you’re writing data models,” said CEO and co-founder Lukas Schulte.
The software runs on local machines, removing the need to pay for cloud-based compiler tools.
“SDF extracts SQL compilers from their clouds and puts them on your laptop to power the next generation of data developer tooling,” the company wrote in a blog post.
SDF has paying customers at a handful of companies, including ClassDojo, Obie, and Linqto.
“Understanding how data moves through a system from ingestion to consumption is incredibly challenging yet incredibly important for everything from developer productivity to cost optimization to data governance to building out proper training sets for AI models with robust data provenance,” Schulte said.
Schulte previously led engineering at PiñataFarms, a Los Angeles startup that builds consumer creative video tools.
Wolfram Schulte — Lukas’ father — is another co-founder. He spent more than 17 years at Microsoft as an engineering leader, and was most recently a principal architect at Meta, working on data warehouse infrastructure.
Other co-founders include Michael Levin, who also spent time at Microsoft and Meta, and Elias DeFaria, a founding engineer at PiñataFarms who previously co-founded a music streaming platform.
The company’s investors include Seattle-based Founders’ Co-op; RTP Global; Two Sigma Ventures; Sequoia; and Andreessen Horowitz.
“SDF is the antidote to a data world that has lost its mind,” said Aviel Ginzburg, general partner at Founders’ Co-op. “Their vision removes all of the complexity without asking folks to change the way that they think about data and provides results. We see this challenge all across our portfolio and I felt it first-hand as a founder.”
SDF employs 15 people, with about half the team based at its downtown Seattle headquarters.
