The Amsterdam-based company behind the widely-used open source data tool Polars has closed an €18 million ($21 million) Series A funding round, with Accel leading the investment alongside Bain Capital Partners and angel investors.
What began as creator Ritchie Vink’s side project during the pandemic has transformed into a major player in the data processing space. Frustrated by the constraints of Pandas, a popular data table management tool, Vink built a superior query engine using Rust programming language. Five years later, his creation has gained massive adoption among data scientists and teams who value its significantly faster data processing capabilities.
The impressive combination of performance improvements and widespread usage attracted venture capital attention, but the Polars funding round was driven by the company’s strategic business roadmap. Two years after establishing itself as a commercial entity, the team recently introduced Polars Cloud, a managed data platform enabling users to execute large-scale queries in cloud environments.
“In the open source community, the joke is that you can rewrite anything in Rust and it becomes better,” explained Accel partner Zhenya Loginov, who spearheaded the investment. “The reason that it’s a joke is that it is not a real sustainable advantage, and you need to do a lot more.”
Vink and co-founder Chiel Peters, formerly CTO at Xomnia, are focused on developing complementary products around their core tool. Their roadmap includes Polars Cloud and Polars Distributed, a distributed engine designed to handle petabyte-scale datasets rather than smaller data collections. This new feature, currently in public beta testing, will receive the majority of the fresh capital injection.
The startup positions Polars Distributed as a direct competitor to Apache Spark, the technology that formed the foundation for Databricks. Previously, targeting Pandas’ market share was sufficient to secure a $4 million seed round from Bain Capital in 2023. However, since Pandas remains open source without commercial backing, and despite Polars achieving over 24 million downloads, monetization required additional scaling capabilities that Polars Distributed provides through managed cluster technology.
Loginov described this expansion as accessing a “more interesting” secondary market, agreeing with Vink that Polars’ true value lies in bridging the performance gap between Pandas and Spark. “If you go into being able to process datasets of any size and complexity, you’re solving a lot of challenges for a lot of enterprises. So we felt that the ultimate market is potentially extremely large,” Loginov stated.
The company reports that their core product already supports production environments across finance, life sciences, and logistics sectors. The launch of Polars Cloud and Polars Distributed represents a significant new phase for the organization.
For entrepreneurs seeking to commercialize open source projects, Loginov highlighted a crucial insight from Vink’s experience. “Polars became successful because it addressed a really big problem — he found a niche where the technology available today is just outdated by a mile. So I would suggest finding a large problem.”
The Polars funding success demonstrates how identifying genuine technological gaps and building superior solutions can attract substantial venture capital investment, even when starting as personal projects during challenging times.
