Data has become an integral asset in almost every sector of the world, powering certain technologies such as video streaming services, digital banking, and the development of AI. It is also widely-distributed across numerous platforms such as databases, data lakes, and data warehouses, making it quite complex to combine it into a unified whole and use in real-time scenarios. This is why Dozer was created, a product to help developers provide real-time data access via APIs in a completely plug-and-play format.
Founded in Singapore by Vivek Gudapuri and Matteo Pelati, Dozer has since grown to a distributed team of 10 spread across the Asia-Pacific region. The product was able to test its product with undisclosed design partners leading its emergence today, with an additional $3 million worth of seed funding from Sequoia Capital India, Google’s Gradient Ventures, Surge, and January Capital.
The company offers solutions across streaming databases, ETLs (Extract, Transform, Loads), caching layers, and instant APIs, something that other competing solutions also present – but Dozer is different. It uses an opinionated approach aimed at solving the right amount of problems in each category in order to provide fast building experiences for developers, and is accessed through gRPC & REST APIs which allow for lower latencies compared to other solutions.
Though curved as ‘open-source’, Dozer works on the Elastic License 2.0, a ‘source-available’ license rather than open-source, allowing third-party users to adjust features and fix bugs and not use it for hosted or managed service. Dozer has plans to switch to a dual-license “very soon”, however, and all of its client libraries are MIT-licensed at the present moment.
Dozer takes care of all the data extractions, caching, and indexing while also surfacing it through APIs that can be spun up in minutes, saving time and money that would otherwise be spent building and maintaining several integrations. Notable contributions to the product include Ioannis Papapanagiotou who helped build the Netflix-owned platform Bulldozer a few years ago.
Currently, Dozer is working towards monetization by introducing a hosted SaaS version with a number of additional features such as auto-scaling, instant deployments, security, compliance, and rate-limiting. It is only a matter of time before Dozer makes developers lives a lot easier when it comes to creating real-time data solutions.
