Our Story
Last updated Jan 30, 2023
Elementary was founded by Maayan and Or in August of 2021.
We are long time friends who met through Or’s wife - who worked with Maayan. After ruining too many double dates with talks about startups, data, and engineering, we decided to start a company together.
It quickly became clear to us that we wanted to solve a problem we had experienced first hand. We also aimed to focus on a field where we felt that we have strong founders-market fit. Our shared background and strengths are in software development, data, and security.
We brainstormed around pains we experienced in our careers. At some point, we realized that while working with data in entirely different environments, we both experienced similar frustrating pains around data reliability.
In software development and DevOps there are tools and methods to achieve reliability. In cyber security, building visibility and detecting anomalies as early as possible is critical. We figured we could apply the knowledge and expertise we have from these domains to solving data reliability at scale.
At this point, we simply talked to as many data professionals as we could find. People we worked with, friends of friends, and mostly tons of cold reach outs. We talked to around 70 teams in a few weeks. We wanted to learn if they trust their data. Do they have visibility and detection? What do they do about it? What solutions have they used or considered? We also asked about how they work, what they care about, and how they adopt new technologies.
The more talks we had, the more clear it became - if we were data or analytics engineers, there is no solution we would have been happy to use. One you can deploy in minutes, easily configure and extend to fit your needs, and integrate with your existing workflow.
We decided to build it.
Timeline
August 2021 - Data observability research and ideation
September 2021 - OSS data lineage released.
October 2021 - Got accepted to YC W22 batch.
November 2021 - First OSS contributor!
January 2022 - We started YC W22 batch, it was a great decision and we highly recommend it.
March 2022 - We launched the Elementary dbt package for monitoring data pipelines and detecting anomalies.
April 2022 - We raised our seed round, and reached 500 Github stars milestone.
June 2022 - We launched the Elementary data observability UI, and Idan joined.
July 2022 - Elon and Noa joined.
August 2022 - 300 Slack community members.
October 2022 - We launched a new website, including testimonials from companies using Elementary in production to monitor their data.
November 2022 - 500 Slack community members, and Itamar joined. We also moved to our own office.
December 2022 - 30 OSS contributors milestone.
January 2023 - Our first community contributed integration (Postgres), and Roi joined the team.
March 2023 - Noa (K) joined the team.
April 2023 - Noy joined the team.
June 2023 - Ella and Ofek joined the team.
September 2023 - Daniel and Erik joined the team.