Founder: Mike Kowalchik
Founding: 2022
Mission: End pipeline tyranny
Employees: 8 & 60% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & <$10M raised
Investors: AlleyCorp, Hyperplane, Impellent
Key Customers: Coming Soon!
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$25M (assuming average equity dilution in Pre-Seed fundraising)
^ this is a useless number from MGMT Boston. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Matterbeam is an infrastructure software startup ending data pipeline tyranny, freeing data to make enterprises more effective. This Seed stage startup envisions a deconstruction of ETL pipelines – extract, transform, load no more – so enterprise data is more portable, immutable, and most importantly…flexible.
Founder & CEO Michael Kowalchik has had a long and successful career in & around data. After Pluralsight acquired his last company, Smarterer (in 2014), he was tasked with integrating and migrating their various products into a platform offering (Smarterer was their 5th or 6th acquisition). Data wasn’t flowing freely across the enterprise so Mike & his team got to work redesigning how it flowed, creating a “data vascular system”, with great success.
Eventually he left Pluralsight to take some time off and travel. But enterprise data remained trapped across the digital world. Whether it was his wife, a Marketing executive who couldn’t retrieve user analytics from a company database, or other friends at startups who had trouble ingesting data, they all struggled with getting access to and using data. When Mike heard about an industry white paper which theorized an approach similar to what he’d already built at Pluralsight, he took it as a sign from the universe to bring his Data Mesh vision to life.
Global cloud infrastructure spend is $700B+ in 2025 (src) and the global data pipeline market was $8B in 2023, growing to $33B+ by 2030 (src). Matterbeam is solving the complex answer to a simple question: “have you ever been at a company and tried to do anything with data that wasn’t in a BI dashboard? What was that experience like?” You know the answer.
Hundreds of billions of dollars are thrown at systems (see above), tools, and teams to address the symptoms of a flawed underlying system. There are major hidden costs in the form of productivity too. Getting access to data is just plain hard. But if you could make it easier, you could change the relationship with data across time, cost, and open up new possibilities for innovation.
Matterbeam is ending the tyranny of pipelines, re-thinking cloud infrastructure from the ground up. They store every piece of customer data in an immutable log – every record, every row, every event – that flows through. Too expensive, right? Well, not really anymore.
The lynchpin of their opportunity comes down to the falling cost of cloud storage. 1 petabyte of data – the equivalent of 200M 5MB photos, 233,000 DVD quality movies, or 500B pages of text – only costs $1,000/month when stored properly.
Matterbeam is able to store and emit data to multiple end layers (think Databricks, Snowflake, Redshift, etc.) to make it more portable for teams across a company. Their Emitter gets enterprise data into the right tool in the right shape at the right time, functioning as the “load” component of a conventional ETL process.
Emitters operate independently from the data collection, so there’s flexibility to pause and restart without impacting the source tailored to a target system’s requirements. Their solution changes the mental model from point to point, single destination thinking and creates a system that’s much more like a network. Matterbeam is decoupling data from the destination (in both time and space), breaking apart traditional pipeline thinking. It’s a data agility platform!
After an initial deployment with one of their biggest initial customers, the COO came to Mike and asked if they could migrate the initial deployment from one database into their product experience. He gave them 3 weeks to get the resources properly allocated. But it only took 1 day! Matterbeam is allowing companies to change their strategies based on speed and data portability across CRM, search, and data migrations of all flavors without impacting production workloads.
Their target customers are VPs of Engineering and Data Science at mid-market companies with a roadmap to capture more of the enterprise in the coming years. They are working with a handful of initial customers via founder-led sales to refine their positioning and will deploy use cases at ever increasing scale to complete their platform offering.
The team’s big goals for 2025 are to finish building out their initial platform and sign long term contracts with their initial enterprise customers. They will likely complete a Seed fundraise and grow their engineering team to jumpstart the flywheel further. In the 2H of 2025, they hope to grow to dozens of mid market customers and bring on more engineers from their Boston HQ.
Operators to Know:
- Ryan Betts, Senior Engineer
- Iana Dankova, Product Manager
- David Glickman, COO
- Alex Jackson, GTM Leader
- Kay Johansen, Senior Engineer
- David Sturgis, Senior Engineer
- Dane Thurber, Founding Engineer
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Matterbeam team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
- More roles coming in 2025!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
- What are the key goals for 2025?
- Who are Matterbeam’s largest incumbent competitors?
- What is the long term vision for the company?
- What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2025 // teams that need the most help?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Matterbeam you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more data scientists into the future. All analysts, professional and amateurs alike, applaud your efforts. See you around town!