Kurrent: Making data as available and ubiquitous as electricity

Data is at the heart of everything in our digital world. Especially so in this new era of AI which makes how we store and interrogate data so vitally important. As cloud computing transformed data handling during the 2010s, AI and machine learning are introducing a new paradigm, requiring high-fidelity, context-rich, real time data. This backdrop is why we are so excited to announce our Funds’ investment in Kurrent. 

Kurrent - previously known as Event Store - was born out of an open-source project called Event Store Database (ESDB), created 12 years ago as the first event-native data platform. It has been battle-tested for years and at scale and, due to the explosion of AI, the moment has come for the Kurrent to scale this technology into the mainstream.

Imagine your business is like a movie, and traditional databases are just taking snapshots of the final scene. With Kurrent, you keep the state history in the core data model which means it’s like having a complete video recording of every single scene, with detailed behind-the-scenes commentary. With this context-rich approach to data, you have complete story preservation (nothing is lost or recorded over) and not just the end result, but how you got there. Where traditional databases store the ‘what’, Kurrent captures the ‘when’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ and makes it available in near real time. It’s a true paradigm shift for how to architect your software application.

Why does this matter? In this new AI-powered world, LLMs and other kinds of machine learning models can only be as good as the data they’re trained on. If you put garbage in, you will get garbage out and a significant amount of time and resource is being spent on cleaning and transforming the data underpinning these models. 

By keeping the original ‘source of truth’ intact and preserving every historical data point, Kurrent maintains data fidelity which is crucially important, especially in large data models where resolution can be lost as data is transferred, updated and reused. The highest resolution data is source data and with the Kurrent platform, businesses can always have access to the original, native source of truth. This is essential for any analytics and especially for training and running AI and ML models.

Kurrent has an impressive leadership team behind the wheels headed by CEO Kirk Dunn who was the ex COO of Cloudera and scaled the company from less than 50 people to more than 2000 and a successful IPO. He has assembled an impressive team around him including David Wang, who joined from the popular streaming company, Redpanda, and was also previously as Cloudera and Rubrik.

Real-time access to high-quality, reliable, and context-rich data undoubtedly powers a wide range of business capabilities and Kurrent has already seen great traction with nearly 150 enterprise customers and more than 50 million (!) downloads of ESDB. But it is with the emergence of AI that this platform really comes into its own, enabling use cases that are only just being imagined. AI is driving the biggest change in database technology since data moved to the cloud, and Kurrent is right at the heart of this paradigm shift.

The new brand Kurrent was chosen because of the parallels between electricity and data. The harnessing of electricity changed the course of history and how we live our lives. Likewise, data now powers almost everything we do. Kurrent’s mission is for data to be as available and as ubiquitous as electricity and Creandum couldn’t be more excited to be on this journey with them and our friends at Crane.