Pomegra
Edelbyte, a Tel Aviv and San Francisco startup, exited stealth on November 11, 2026 with $70 million in seed and Series A funding led by Sequoia and Quiet Capital for AI-era search and analytics.
Key Takeaways
- Edelbyte raised $70M in combined seed and Series A funding, led by Sequoia and Quiet Capital.
- Greenoaks and Swish Ventures also invested; valuation and the seed/Series A split are undisclosed.
- Its four co-founders spent about 20 years at Microsoft building data systems, including Kusto.
Lead
Edelbyte announced on November 11, 2026 that it has raised $70 million in seed and Series A funding, with Sequoia and Quiet Capital leading. Greenoaks and Swish Ventures also took part. The company, founded in 2025 and based in Tel Aviv and San Francisco, sells a unified search and analytics platform built for AI-driven workloads. It says it already runs petabyte-scale deployments for Fortune 500 customers, though it named none of them.
The company did not disclose a valuation. It also did not say how the $70 million divides between the seed and Series A stages, which makes the round hard to benchmark against other early data infrastructure deals.
Who Is Behind Edelbyte?
Four co-founders run Edelbyte, and all of them spent roughly two decades at Microsoft building data systems for multiple products and services. The team is associated with Kusto, the engine behind Azure Data Explorer. Avner Aharoni is CEO, Evgeney Ryzhyk is CTO, Alexander Sloutsky is VP of Engineering, and Yoni Leibowitz is VP of Platform Engineering.
That pedigree explains the size of the check. Kusto handles log, telemetry and time-series queries at scale, which is the same class of workload Edelbyte now targets. Investors are backing a team that has operated this kind of engine in production, not a prototype. Headcount beyond the four founders was not disclosed.
What Does Edelbyte Actually Build?
Edelbyte builds a single platform that handles both search and analytics over enterprise data, with governed data access and deployment on any public or private cloud or on-premises. Customers can choose a managed service or run it themselves. The self-hosted option matters for regulated buyers that cannot move data into a vendor's cloud.
The pitch rests on cost. Aharoni said the systems companies use to search and analyze data "were built for a world before AI." AI agents issue far more queries than human analysts do, and each query carries a bill. Edelbyte says customers migrating from legacy systems have cut platform costs, and in some cases ran ten times as many queries within the same budget. Those figures come from the company, and no independent benchmark accompanied the announcement.
Who Does Edelbyte Compete With?
Edelbyte competes with Snowflake, Databricks and ClickHouse, according to the launch materials, and it positions itself against a data infrastructure market it sizes at $300 billion. That market framing is the company's own and should be read as a ceiling, not a forecast.
The incumbents are formidable. Snowflake and Databricks both sell broad data platforms with large installed bases, and ClickHouse has built a following in real-time analytics. A newcomer with four founders and no named customers must show that a cost advantage survives contact with enterprise procurement, migration effort and the incumbents' own price cuts. Unified search and analytics is a narrower wedge than a full data cloud, which may help Edelbyte pick fights it can win.
Why Does a $70M Seed and Series A Matter?
A $70 million combined early round signals that investors see query volume from AI agents as a new cost problem, not a repackaged old one. Bogomil Balkansky of Sequoia said Edelbyte "combines rich analytics, deployment flexibility, and an architecture built for efficiency." Efficiency is the operative word, since the thesis depends on the economics of running large numbers of queries rather than on a new interface.
The caution is the opacity. Without a valuation, a stage split or revenue, the round's price cannot be judged. A company that skipped a standalone seed announcement and went straight to a $70 million reveal has presumably had customers in production for some time, but the numbers behind that are unpublished.
What Comes Next for Edelbyte?
Edelbyte will likely spend the capital on engineering hires and on turning unnamed Fortune 500 deployments into public references. Public case studies with audited cost comparisons would be the clearest test of the ten-times claim. A larger Series B at a disclosed valuation, if one follows, would show whether enterprise buyers are moving workloads off established platforms.
Israeli-founded infrastructure companies with US go-to-market bases have drawn steady venture interest, and Sequoia's involvement adds a recognizable name for enterprise buyers. Still, the competitive set is well funded, and price pressure from Snowflake, Databricks and ClickHouse could narrow any early advantage.
Outlook
Edelbyte enters the market with $70 million, a team that built Kusto, and a cost-per-query argument aimed at AI agent traffic. Valuation, revenue, customer names and independent benchmarks remain unpublished. The next 12 months of customer disclosures and hiring will show whether the pitch holds against Snowflake, Databricks and ClickHouse.
