Microsoft Veterans’ Edelbyte Raises $70M Seed and Series A Led by Sequoia to Challenge Data Infrastructure Giants

Edelbyte, founded by four data infrastructure veterans who each spent about 20 years at Microsoft, has come out of stealth with $70 million in seed and Series A funding. Sequoia and Quiet Capital led the round, with participation from Greenoaks and Swish Ventures. The company announced the round on Nov. 11.

Edelbyte is building a search and analytics platform meant to handle AI-driven demand at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems. It sees a $300 billion market dominated by Snowflake, Databricks and ClickHouse. Roughly a year after its founding, the company says it already runs petabyte-scale deployments with leading Fortune 500 customers.

“Built for a world before AI”

The founders are CEO Avner Aharoni, CTO Evgeney Ryzhyk, VP of Engineering Alexander Sloutsky and VP of Platform Engineering Yoni Leibowitz. They spent more than a decade together building data systems behind dozens of Microsoft products and services. The company describes itself as founded in 2025 by the team behind Microsoft’s Kusto.

As AI began driving unprecedented demand for data, the team saw a chance to help companies keep up without the rising cost and complexity of existing systems. The aim is to make it faster and cheaper to search and analyze data wherever it is stored. The company says customers migrating from legacy systems have cut platform costs and, in some cases, run ten times as many queries on the same budget.

The problem is a long-standing one. Keeping growing volumes of data open to fast analysis is expensive, so companies often limit queries, archive historical data or spend more. AI agents add pressure by generating far more queries and expecting fast answers to complex, unpredictable questions across large datasets, Edelbyte says.

“The systems companies rely on to search and analyze their data were built for a world before AI,” said Aharoni. As AI becomes central to how businesses operate, he said, the volume and complexity of queries will grow far beyond what legacy infrastructure was designed for, creating room for a new leader in search and analytics with AI at its core.

Bogomil Balkansky, a partner at Sequoia, said Edelbyte combines rich analytics, deployment flexibility and an architecture built for efficiency, with AI as a core workload. He called the team’s experience building and operating large-scale data systems rare.

The product

Edelbyte is a unified data platform for search and analytics. It combines analytical capabilities and governed data access with an architecture designed for performance and cost efficiency. It runs in any public or private cloud and on-premises, with managed and self-hosted options. The company is based in Tel Aviv and San Francisco.

It plans to use the funding to expand its enterprise customer base, grow its international presence and strengthen its team.