Swarm64

About Swarm64

Swarm64 operated as a specialized developer of database acceleration technology, primarily focusing on enhancing the open-source PostgreSQL database system. The company was established in 2013 by Eivind Liland, Alfonso Martinez, and Thomas Richter, who brought together expertise in database software and parallel processing. The firm's core mission was to address performance limitations in PostgreSQL, especially for analytics, data warehousing, and real-time data processing workloads.

The company's main offering was a database accelerator that initially leveraged Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware to significantly boost query performance and data handling speeds. This technology worked by offloading processing tasks from the CPU to the FPGA, enabling massively parallel processing of writing, reading, filtering, and compressing data within the database. This approach allowed businesses to use the cost-effective and widely adopted PostgreSQL for demanding applications typically reserved for more expensive, proprietary data warehouse systems. Benchmark tests demonstrated substantial improvements, such as up to 50x faster queries and a 5x reduction in data storage space. In 2020, Swarm64 pivoted to also offer a software-only version of its accelerator, making the performance enhancements accessible without specialized hardware.

Swarm64's business model included selling its accelerator software and providing performance engineering support, with pricing that varied from free tiers to monthly fees based on CPU cores. The company targeted clients looking to modernize data warehouses, scale analytic applications, and analyze high-velocity data streams for use cases like IoT, interactive dashboards, and geospatial analysis. Over its history, Swarm64 secured significant venture capital funding, raising a total of $21.2 million over four rounds from investors including Intel Capital, Investinor, Target Partners, and Xilinx. A key milestone was the Series B funding round of $12.5 million in 2018. The company's journey culminated in its acquisition by ServiceNow in August 2021, a move intended to integrate Swarm64's database performance and scalability expertise into ServiceNow's Now Platform.