Splice Machine

Splice Machine was established in 2012 by co-founders Monte Zweben, John Leach, and Gene Davis, with its headquarters in San Francisco. The company positioned itself as a provider of a relational database built upon the architecture of Apache Hadoop, HBase, and Spark. This structure was designed to handle both transactional and analytical workloads, offering scalability up to petabytes of data while maintaining SQL functionality. The platform aimed to unify the capabilities of a relational database management system (RDBMS), a data warehouse, and a machine learning platform into a single, integrated system deployable both on-premises and in the cloud.

The company's primary offering was a data platform geared towards operational artificial intelligence (AI), intended to enable businesses to power intelligent applications with real-time data at scale. This platform was developed to help organizations improve decision-making for mission-critical applications by integrating operational workloads, analytics, and machine learning, thereby avoiding the need to combine multiple complex platforms. Key features included auto-sharding, fault tolerance, and high availability. It catered to industries such as financial services, healthcare, supply chain, and energy, with clients that included Wells Fargo, Kroger, and Infinera.

CEO and co-founder Monte Zweben brought a wealth of experience in AI and entrepreneurship to the venture. His career began at NASA's Ames Research Center, where he was deputy chief of the artificial intelligence branch. This was followed by a series of successful entrepreneurial ventures, including Red Pepper Software, which merged with PeopleSoft, and Blue Martini Software, which had a significant IPO. Zweben's background, with degrees from Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, reflects a deep-seated focus on applying AI to solve real-world problems, a philosophy he embedded in Splice Machine. John Leach had previously worked with Zweben at Blue Martini and founded Incite Retail, while Gene Davis had a history of working in several of Zweben's previous companies.

Throughout its operation, Splice Machine secured a total of $75 million in funding over seven rounds from investors such as Mohr Davidow Ventures, InterWest Partners, and Salesforce Ventures. The last funding round, a Series B, was in February 2019 for $16 million. However, in July 2021, the company initiated insolvency proceedings under California state law and was no longer operating the technology and services platform.

Keywords: relational database, big data, operational AI, SQL, machine learning platform, data warehouse, real-time analytics, Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, data platform