When ZincSearch Founder Prabhat Sharma worked as a solutions architect at AWS, helping customers implement many tools in addition to AWS infrastructure services. He noticed that most of the solutions designed to help companies sift through log data were from another era, and those that weren’t hadn’t quite caught on.
He decided it was time to build a more modern alternative, and last August he started brainstorming an idea. “I looked around and then saw that there were a few people who had tried to build a few things. But none of them were really good enough. So I thought, let try me and see if I can build something.
He spent several months developing what would become ZincSearch. In December, he put it on GitHub, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it had some traction. The biggest incumbent in this space is Elastic, the creators of ElasticSearch, a public company founded in 2012. He wanted to build something that was a modern alternative to this tool without some of the overhead he observed when he was at Amazon. So he decided to create a single binary that would install quickly and not use a ton of RAM.
He thinks the solution he’s built is an improvement over what’s out there, and it seems users agree. The launch sparked discussions on Hacker News and Redditand quickly racked up 2,000 stars on GitHub — today, the tool is approaching 8,000 stars, a sign that people like it.
This has not gone unnoticed in venture capital circles, which monitor open source projects for potential companies to invest in. When investors reached out, Sharma realized he was onto something. In April, he quit his job at Amazon to start ZincSearch as a business.
The startup is still very early and still underway as an alpha project, but Sharma has big plans. “At the moment it’s still in alpha, but I plan to do a general release in three to six months and offer a cloud service by the end of the year, most likely,” he said. -he declares.
As he completes the administrative aspects of setting up the legal business, which is only a few months old at this point, he is looking to hire six people by the end of the year to help complete the open project. source and launch the cloud version. As a first-time founder, he’s just put the first pieces of the business together, he’s only just beginning to think about hiring and how to hire diverse employees, but he knows that diverse teams work better and he says he’s looking for ways to make that happen.
The company announced an initial investment of $3.6 million to help advance its vision. The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners with participation from Dell Technologies Capital, Secure Octane, Cardinia Ventures and several technology industry leaders.