{"id":168985,"date":"2021-06-10T18:10:19","date_gmt":"2021-06-10T13:10:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/venturebeat.com\/?p=2693282"},"modified":"2021-06-10T18:10:19","modified_gmt":"2021-06-10T13:10:19","slug":"data-flow-automation-engine-prefect-raises-32m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.technologyforyou.org\/data-flow-automation-engine-prefect-raises-32m\/","title":{"rendered":"Data flow automation engine Prefect raises $32M"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Elevate your enterprise data technology and strategy at Transform 2021<\/a><\/em>. <\/p>\n

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Dataflow automation<\/a> startup Prefect<\/a> today announced it has raised $32 million in a series B funding round led by Tiger Global. The company says it will use the capital to further develop its platform, attract talent, and support its growing community of users.<\/p>\n

When McKinsey<\/a> surveyed 1,500 executives across industries and regions in 2018, 66% said addressing skills gaps related to automation and digitization was a \u201ctop 10\u201d priority. Salesforce\u2019s recent Trends in Workflow Automation report found that 95% of IT leaders are prioritizing automation and 70% of execs are seeing the equivalent of over four hours saved per employee each week. Moreover, according to market research firm Fact.MR<\/a>, the adoption of business workflow automation at scale could create a market opportunity worth over $1.6 billion between 2017 and 2026.<\/p>\n

Prefect, which was founded in 2018, offers a platform that can build, run, and monitor up to millions of data workflows and pipelines. The company\u2019s hybrid execution model keeps code and data private while taking advantage of a managed orchestration service. Customers can use Prefect for scheduling, error handling, data serialization, and parameterization, leveraging a Python framework to combine tasks into workflows and then deploy and monitor their execution through a dashboard or API.<\/p>\n

Prefect customers can design their workflows with a framework called Core, which sends metadata to Prefect\u2019s cloud in order to register a flow for scheduling. Flow updates are asynchronously sent to the cloud as metadata, ensuring Prefect can\u2019t view the content of the flows themselves.<\/p>\n

Hybrid engine<\/h2>\n

Founder and CEO Jeremiah Lowin says the key to Prefect\u2019s cloud hybrid execution model lies in agents \u2014 small open source programs that can launch flows into any environment. Agents can stream real-time state updates and kick off new runs, with an API to query data as well as join, filter, sort, and transform it.<\/p>\n

Prefect\u2019s scheduler service offers options that allow for per-run changes, and it lets users label flows so they\u2019re picked up by agents with matching labels to support multiple environments. Prefect can start, pause, and resume tasks at any time, allowing manual steps like review and approval, and it can give flows access to sensitive information at runtime, including API keys or passwords.<\/p>\n

If a task crashes unexpectedly, Prefect can restart it autonomously via special \u201cLazarus\u201d agents. And the platform alerts stakeholders when an agent goes offline, exposing logs for streaming, filtering, and searching.<\/p>\n

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\"Prefect\"<\/p>\n

Above: Prefect\u2019s online dashboard.<\/p>\n

Image Credit: Prefect<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Lowin says Prefect had a banner year in 2020, with 130% quarter-over-quarter usage growth since February 2020. The company recently announced a relationship with Microsoft for Startups to advance dataflow automation, and it claims its platform is now processing 25 million tasks per month and 2 million workflows per month.<\/p>\n

Prefect\u2019s success aligns with broader industry trends in digital transformation<\/a>. According<\/a> to McKinsey, data flows have raised the global gross domestic product by at least 10% over a decade. The value totaled $7.8 trillion in 2014 alone, contributing to economic growth primarily by raising productivity.<\/p>\n

Market Research Future predicts<\/a> the global data analytics market alone will be valued at over $132 billion by 2026. A range of organizations can use data to boost their marketing strategies, increase their bottom line, personalize their content, and better understand their customers. In fact, businesses that use big data<\/a> increase their profits by an average of 8%, according to a survey<\/a> conducted by BARC research.<\/p>\n

Bessemer Venture Partners also participated in Prefect\u2019s most recent funding round. This brings the Washington, D.C.-based company\u2019s total raised to date to over $57 million.<\/p>\n

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