BOSTON, Jan. 25, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sync Computing, a deep tech, distributed cloud infrastructure company, came out of stealth mode today, revealing its initial products, customer traction, and $6.1 million funding. Moore Strategic Ventures and National Grid Partners led the round, joining existing investor The Engine. Alongside active pilots with both public and private enterprise customers in SaaS, finance, and data sectors, the company recently was awarded a $1M contract from the Department of Defense for large, distributed workload optimization. Sync Computing is using the new capital to advance its leadership in the modern data infrastructure space and support further development of its accelerated data infrastructure engine and solution lines.
Spun out of MIT Lincoln Laboratory by Jeff Chou and Suraj Bramhavar, Activate Fellows (Cohort 2020) supported by DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office, and MIT Startup Exchange Accelerator veterans, Sync Computing is harnessing the computational power of physics to find mathematically the best way to provision cloud infrastructure for data, machine learning, and scientific workloads. Sync’s technology empowers organizations who run thousands of data pipelines daily to automatically optimize low level compute resources to make running the cloud easier, faster, and cheaper.
The technology challenges addressed by Sync Computing are a fundamental part of the massively growing data infrastructure market that Gartner values at over $66B. Cloud costs are exploding - with annual enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services estimated at $130B (Synergy Research), and over 36% of enterprises spend more than $12 million per year on public clouds, 61% of organizations plan to optimize existing use of cloud (cost savings), making it the top initiative for the fifth year in a row (Flexera). Solving for the problem of managing growing big data workloads against their optimal cloud compute is an urgent, formidable, and yet-to-be-solved challenge until now.
“Companies with data-intensive cloud workflows struggle to hire data engineers while their engineers spend unproductive time manually configuring and tuning rather than important work to move the needle on the business top line. We believe Sync automation can add thousands of hours of data engineering productivity every year,” said Reed Sturtevant, general partner at The Engine. “What Sync offers is transformative - an automatic configuration and cost-performance optimization solution for distributed cloud applications. Previously it was thought to be too mathematically complex and dynamic to solve this challenge, but Sync has figured it out.”
“With today’s constantly expanding use of large-scale cloud computing, we’ve seen companies who have only a dozen engineers responsible for managing up to 10,000 data pipelines per day - it’s physically impossible to optimize cloud infrastructure at such large scales - until now,” said Jeff Chou, co-founder and CEO of Sync Computing. “We’ve essentially converted large scale cloud infrastructure into a math problem, and then solve it in seconds. We are also excited to do our part in reducing the wasteful use of cloud resources and its impact on global carbon footprint. We are bullish on what 2022 will bring for us, for our customers, and for the cloud space.”
As part of its public launch, Sync is announcing two solutions - the Sync Autotuner for Apache Spark, and the Sync Orchestrator - a major step in large-scale cloud multi-tenant orchestration of complex data pipelines, inspired by Sync cofounders’ PhD research on solving complex combinatorial optimization problems, which was published in Nature. The Sync Autotuner for Apache Spark eliminates provisioning friction for EMR and Databricks on AWS infrastructure, while reducing runtimes and job costs dramatically.
The Sync Autotuner has already been field-tested and its performance validated by a number of marquee customers, leading to key partnerships. Duolingo, the world's #1 language learning platform, serving more than 40 million monthly active users, cut daily data job costs on the cloud in half with the Sync Autotuner, with only a negligible increase in run time. “We run many big data jobs, so optimizing our cloud processing performance is critical to our success as a business,” said Kevin Wang, analytics engineer at Duolingo. “We were impressed by Sync Computing's delivery and appreciated their ability to predict optimized results, even before running our jobs. We are confident they can continue to help us forecast performance and reduce costs for our Spark workloads.”
The Spark AWS Autotuner is available today and the Sync Orchestrator is available for preview upon request. Interested parties can sign up here.
About Sync Computing
Sync Computing is the first company to harness the computational power of physics to find mathematically the best way to provision cloud infrastructure for data, machine learning, and scientific distributed-based workloads. Sync provides the only solution, which globally optimizes and automates application configurations, cloud infrastructure, and scheduling to achieve business goals of performance or cost. Coming out of MIT and co-founded by PhDs Jeff Chou (CEO) and Suraj Bramhavar (CTO), with a growing team joining from MIT, UC Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, IBM, Intel, and Cloudability, the company is working with leading enterprises to optimally tune big data processing across its optimal cloud compute. More at: https://www.synccomputing.com/ (LinkedIn, Twitter).
About The Engine
The Engine is a Cambridge, MA-based venture capital firm. It was conceived and created by MIT in 2016 to address the unmet need for sustained support for startups with the potential to solve complex, existential challenges and make a material, positive impact on society. The Engine provides access to long-term capital, knowledge, connections, as well as the infrastructure these Tough Tech companies need to thrive. For more information, visit www.engine.xyz.
About Moore Strategic Ventures
Moore Strategic Ventures, LLC is the privately held investment company for Louis M. Bacon, founder and CEO of Moore Capital Management, LP.
About National Grid Partners
National Grid Partners (NGP) is the venture investment and innovation arm of National Grid plc., one of the largest investor-owned energy companies in the world. NGP invests for strategic and financial impact and leads company-wide culture transformation efforts. The organization provides a multi-functional approach to building startups, including innovation (new business creation), incubation, corporate venture capital, business development, and culture acceleration. NGP is headquartered in Silicon Valley and has offices in Boston, London, and New York. Visit ngpartners.com or follow us on Twitter @ngpartners_ and LinkedIn.
Media Contact:
Fatimah Nouilati
Scratch Marketing + Media for Sync Computing
fatimah@scratchmm.com
