E-commerce firm Alibaba agreed yesterday to acquire Germany-based Data Artisans for €90m ($103m), allowing retail group Tengelmann and semiconductor and data technology producer Intel to exit, EU-Startups reported.
Founded in 2014, Data Artisans has developed a data stream-processing platform based on Apache Flink, the open source streaming dataflow software created by the company’s founders.
The platform enables enterprises to build applications capable of reacting to data in real time and generating results accordingly. Alibaba has been a Data Artisans partner since 2016, and the company described it as one of the biggest contributors to its codebase.
The company had already raised $1m when Intel’s corporate venturing unit, Intel Capital, led a $6.3m series A round in 2016 that included Tengelmann subsidiary Tengelmann Ventures and venture capital firm Btov Partners.
Alibaba’s announcement of the deal included a reference to a series B round in early 2018, but Data Artisans has not disclosed details of that funding.
Data Artisans co-founders Kostas Tzoumas and Stephan Ewen said in a blog post: “Together with Alibaba, we can enhance our efforts and technology to new horizons by investing even more to open source.
“We can expand to new areas that we have not explored in the past and make sure that Flink becomes a more valuable data processing framework for the modern data-driven, real-time enterprise.”
