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Why we invested in Estuary: the BYOC shift in software infrastructure
We’re excited to welcome Estuary, the right-time data platform solving the AI data bottleneck for enterprises. Estuary’s mission is to simplify how the world moves data, making pipelines dependable, cost-predictable, and AI-ready. The company unifies batch and streaming data movement into one managed system, eliminating the complexity of fragmented data stacks and giving enterprises fine-grained control over latency, cost, and deployment. M13 led Estuary’s $17M million Series A, with participation from Firstmark and Operator Partners.
Why now: the BYOC era of enterprise software
For years, enterprises faced a trade-off: adopt SaaS for agility or keep data in-house for compliance and control. Estuary moves that trade-off.
Its Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) model lets customers:
- Keep data inside their infrastructure
- Run SaaS pipelines securely within their own cloud
- Maintain compliance while enabling AI and analytics
This model is reshaping enterprise infrastructure. As AI adoption accelerates and data sovereignty laws tighten, Estuary gives customers the freedom to modernize their data infrastructure without sacrificing security, compliance or cost control.
Estuary Co-founders David Yaffe and Johnny Graettinger began developing the foundation of Estuary in 2014 and officially launched the company in 2019. Their experience at Google, where they managed high-volume privacy-sensitive data systems during the early days of GDPR, inspired them to design for data locality, portability, and performance at scale, principles that now define Estuary’s architecture.
M13 Managing Partner Karl Alomar has long invested at the intersection of software infrastructure, data systems and AI enablement. He sees Estuary as the clear leader for enterprises seeking agility without compromise.
The right-time data advantage
This is a big shift in how CIOs think about data services. In a recent LinkedIn post, Yaffe said that most data movement platforms treat it as a binary process: stream everything in real time, hope the destination keeps up or batch it on a fixed schedule.
“The reality is that neither extreme works across all use cases,” he said. “Warehouses and lakes don’t always want a firehose. BI teams don’t always need second-by-second updates. Finance definitely doesn’t want unpredictable cost swings.”
Estuary bridges that gap, allowing teams to control how and when data moves—real-time or batch—within the same pipeline, without complex work-arounds. This flexibility is exactly what makes Estuary critical now.
AI systems depend on dependable, fresh data but brittle DIY pipelines and fragmented vendor stacks can’t deliver it. Estuary unifies those worlds, offering a SaaS that never sees your data and a new model of trust and compliance for the AI era.
One pipeline for every workload
Estuary’s vision is to build a right-time data platform and bridge the gap between real time streaming and batch data movement. Whether syncing data for hourly analytics or feeding AI models that demand sub-second freshness, Estuary ensures the right data arrives at the right time reliably, securely, and cost-effectively.
Estuary helps you have a single data pipeline that works with all of those types of applications without having to do a ton of engineering work. That flexibility makes it a foundational tool for enterprises preparing their infrastructure for AI workloads.
Dependability and data sovereignty
Yaffe and Alomar agree: the world of SaaS has reached a moment where customers want control, privacy and agility. And BYOC delivers all three.
“Because of data localization laws and industry-specific regulations, customers need confidence that their data never leaves their four walls,” Yaffe said.
For industries like finance or healthcare, where you can’t have information leaks, Estuary minimizes latency and egress costs while guaranteeing privacy and compliance across clouds and regions. It’s about performance and trust.
Shaping for self-serve success
Estuary didn’t start with one giant enterprise contract; they built self-serve infrastructure that works out-of-the-box for any dataset, any system.
“Data comes in every shape and size,” Yaffe said. “If you want it to work well, you have to spend the hard time making it work for every data set and every system out there. That’s what we did.”
It’s a strategy that caught Alomar’s eye. He noted that being a self-service platform right out of the gate was not the easiest way to start.
“It’s incredibly hard to make a complex platform self-serve,” Alomar said, “so their ability to do that shows how deeply they understand the user journey. There’s a lot of little details on how their product works that just feels very seamless, organic, and natural, qualities that come only from years of building at scale.”
Learning from Google: engineering for scale, trust, and portability
At the core of Estuary is a deceptively simple promise: flexibility, speed, and reliability at scale. The journey to these goals wasn’t easy.
Yaffe and CTO Graettinger first met at Invite Media, later acquired by Google, where they built high-volume, low-latency systems that processed billions of real-time events under strict privacy and reliability constraints. They learned that enterprises needed more than performance: they needed data portability and control. Customers wanted to know where their data was processed and when, anticipating today’s concerns around data sovereignty and compliance.
That realization inspired them to imagine a system that could bring the scale of Google’s infrastructure into a company’s own cloud, preserving performance while maintaining ownership and compliance.
In 2014, they left Google to pursue that vision, founding Arbor, a people-based data marketplace. There they built Gazette, a streaming engine designed for high throughput and strict privacy, handling 16 million queries per second in marketing use cases with demanding data restrictions. Graettinger’s breakthroughs in scalable, privacy-safe streaming became the foundation for what would later evolve into Estuary.
After LiveRamp acquired Arbor in 2016, the duo continued refining their approach, layering in cloud data warehouses to make high-scale data movement accessible beyond big tech.
By 2019, they launched Estuary, merging Graettinger’s technical vision with Yaffe’s focus on usability and customer empathy.
“Johnny saw what needed to exist from a technology standpoint, and I focused on the go to market and making it usable and a natural addition to what companies were already doing,” Yaffe said. “We built Estuary to bring the reliability and portability we learned at Google to every company that moves data.”
Building for the AI tsunami
Estuary isn’t just optimizing data movement and security—it’s building for an era where generative AI will redefine pipelines and use cases.
The explosion of AI workloads is creating unprecedented demand for fast, dependable, and compliant data infrastructure. Estuary’s platform sits at the center of this shift as the team simplifies how enterprises prepare, sync, and serve the data that powers intelligent systems.
“We have a unique role within the generative AI space and are preparing to launch the next generation of that work later this year,” Yaffe said.
This effort focuses on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), a technique for enhancing AI accuracy with domain-specific data. Many companies struggle to make RAG pipelines flexible enough for production.
“Whenever a company goes and builds their actual AI, they build their own pipelines from the ground up,” Yaffe said. “Those systems aren’t flexible or real-time enough. We’re building a platform that is super flexible for real-time RAG.”
Partnership, growth, and what’s next
Alomar sees the Estuary–M13 partnership as just the beginning. The goal is to work with the co-founders to build out how Estuary goes to market so that it doesn’t lose the solid service orientation that customers have come to appreciate.
“Dave and Johnny have built something the market truly needs,” he said. “Their conversion rates and self-serve adoption speak to a product that’s solving real pain points. Because the product is so strong, it’s fueling its own growth.”
As AI adoption accelerates and data volumes surge, Estuary’s combination of technical depth, user empathy, visionary product development, and the backing of partners like M13 is converging at exactly the right time.
Alomar said, “The explosion of data through AI is happening at massive scale. Having a platform like Estuary, one that works efficiently and can be set up far easier than any other, will help enterprises navigate this new world of AI-driven growth.”
Summary
- Estuary, the right-time data platform backed by M13, unifies batch and streaming pipelines into one system and makes enterprise data movement dependable, cost-predictable and AI-ready.
- Estuary’s BYOC model gives enterprises the agility of SaaS with the control of on-prem, addressing growing needs for data sovereignty, compliance and AI-driven performance.
- Estuary is building the foundational data layer for the AI era. Founders David Yaffe and Johnny Graettinger apply deep infrastructure experience from Google and are partnered by M13’s expertise in software infrastructure and AI enablement.
Read more about David Yaffe
Data Integration in Minutes: A Live Demo with Dave Yaffe, CEO & Founder of Estuary
The History And Future Of Real-time Analytics - With David Yaffe
https://estuary.dev/author/dave/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidyaffe/
Follow Estuary
Why we invested in Estuary: the BYOC shift in software infrastructure
We’re excited to welcome Estuary, the right-time data platform solving the AI data bottleneck for enterprises. Estuary’s mission is to simplify how the world moves data, making pipelines dependable, cost-predictable, and AI-ready. The company unifies batch and streaming data movement into one managed system, eliminating the complexity of fragmented data stacks and giving enterprises fine-grained control over latency, cost, and deployment. M13 led Estuary’s $17M million Series A, with participation from Firstmark and Operator Partners.
Why now: the BYOC era of enterprise software
For years, enterprises faced a trade-off: adopt SaaS for agility or keep data in-house for compliance and control. Estuary moves that trade-off.
Its Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) model lets customers:
- Keep data inside their infrastructure
- Run SaaS pipelines securely within their own cloud
- Maintain compliance while enabling AI and analytics
This model is reshaping enterprise infrastructure. As AI adoption accelerates and data sovereignty laws tighten, Estuary gives customers the freedom to modernize their data infrastructure without sacrificing security, compliance or cost control.
Estuary Co-founders David Yaffe and Johnny Graettinger began developing the foundation of Estuary in 2014 and officially launched the company in 2019. Their experience at Google, where they managed high-volume privacy-sensitive data systems during the early days of GDPR, inspired them to design for data locality, portability, and performance at scale, principles that now define Estuary’s architecture.
M13 Managing Partner Karl Alomar has long invested at the intersection of software infrastructure, data systems and AI enablement. He sees Estuary as the clear leader for enterprises seeking agility without compromise.
The right-time data advantage
This is a big shift in how CIOs think about data services. In a recent LinkedIn post, Yaffe said that most data movement platforms treat it as a binary process: stream everything in real time, hope the destination keeps up or batch it on a fixed schedule.
“The reality is that neither extreme works across all use cases,” he said. “Warehouses and lakes don’t always want a firehose. BI teams don’t always need second-by-second updates. Finance definitely doesn’t want unpredictable cost swings.”
Estuary bridges that gap, allowing teams to control how and when data moves—real-time or batch—within the same pipeline, without complex work-arounds. This flexibility is exactly what makes Estuary critical now.
AI systems depend on dependable, fresh data but brittle DIY pipelines and fragmented vendor stacks can’t deliver it. Estuary unifies those worlds, offering a SaaS that never sees your data and a new model of trust and compliance for the AI era.
One pipeline for every workload
Estuary’s vision is to build a right-time data platform and bridge the gap between real time streaming and batch data movement. Whether syncing data for hourly analytics or feeding AI models that demand sub-second freshness, Estuary ensures the right data arrives at the right time reliably, securely, and cost-effectively.
Estuary helps you have a single data pipeline that works with all of those types of applications without having to do a ton of engineering work. That flexibility makes it a foundational tool for enterprises preparing their infrastructure for AI workloads.
Dependability and data sovereignty
Yaffe and Alomar agree: the world of SaaS has reached a moment where customers want control, privacy and agility. And BYOC delivers all three.
“Because of data localization laws and industry-specific regulations, customers need confidence that their data never leaves their four walls,” Yaffe said.
For industries like finance or healthcare, where you can’t have information leaks, Estuary minimizes latency and egress costs while guaranteeing privacy and compliance across clouds and regions. It’s about performance and trust.
Shaping for self-serve success
Estuary didn’t start with one giant enterprise contract; they built self-serve infrastructure that works out-of-the-box for any dataset, any system.
“Data comes in every shape and size,” Yaffe said. “If you want it to work well, you have to spend the hard time making it work for every data set and every system out there. That’s what we did.”
It’s a strategy that caught Alomar’s eye. He noted that being a self-service platform right out of the gate was not the easiest way to start.
“It’s incredibly hard to make a complex platform self-serve,” Alomar said, “so their ability to do that shows how deeply they understand the user journey. There’s a lot of little details on how their product works that just feels very seamless, organic, and natural, qualities that come only from years of building at scale.”
Learning from Google: engineering for scale, trust, and portability
At the core of Estuary is a deceptively simple promise: flexibility, speed, and reliability at scale. The journey to these goals wasn’t easy.
Yaffe and CTO Graettinger first met at Invite Media, later acquired by Google, where they built high-volume, low-latency systems that processed billions of real-time events under strict privacy and reliability constraints. They learned that enterprises needed more than performance: they needed data portability and control. Customers wanted to know where their data was processed and when, anticipating today’s concerns around data sovereignty and compliance.
That realization inspired them to imagine a system that could bring the scale of Google’s infrastructure into a company’s own cloud, preserving performance while maintaining ownership and compliance.
In 2014, they left Google to pursue that vision, founding Arbor, a people-based data marketplace. There they built Gazette, a streaming engine designed for high throughput and strict privacy, handling 16 million queries per second in marketing use cases with demanding data restrictions. Graettinger’s breakthroughs in scalable, privacy-safe streaming became the foundation for what would later evolve into Estuary.
After LiveRamp acquired Arbor in 2016, the duo continued refining their approach, layering in cloud data warehouses to make high-scale data movement accessible beyond big tech.
By 2019, they launched Estuary, merging Graettinger’s technical vision with Yaffe’s focus on usability and customer empathy.
“Johnny saw what needed to exist from a technology standpoint, and I focused on the go to market and making it usable and a natural addition to what companies were already doing,” Yaffe said. “We built Estuary to bring the reliability and portability we learned at Google to every company that moves data.”
Building for the AI tsunami
Estuary isn’t just optimizing data movement and security—it’s building for an era where generative AI will redefine pipelines and use cases.
The explosion of AI workloads is creating unprecedented demand for fast, dependable, and compliant data infrastructure. Estuary’s platform sits at the center of this shift as the team simplifies how enterprises prepare, sync, and serve the data that powers intelligent systems.
“We have a unique role within the generative AI space and are preparing to launch the next generation of that work later this year,” Yaffe said.
This effort focuses on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), a technique for enhancing AI accuracy with domain-specific data. Many companies struggle to make RAG pipelines flexible enough for production.
“Whenever a company goes and builds their actual AI, they build their own pipelines from the ground up,” Yaffe said. “Those systems aren’t flexible or real-time enough. We’re building a platform that is super flexible for real-time RAG.”
Partnership, growth, and what’s next
Alomar sees the Estuary–M13 partnership as just the beginning. The goal is to work with the co-founders to build out how Estuary goes to market so that it doesn’t lose the solid service orientation that customers have come to appreciate.
“Dave and Johnny have built something the market truly needs,” he said. “Their conversion rates and self-serve adoption speak to a product that’s solving real pain points. Because the product is so strong, it’s fueling its own growth.”
As AI adoption accelerates and data volumes surge, Estuary’s combination of technical depth, user empathy, visionary product development, and the backing of partners like M13 is converging at exactly the right time.
Alomar said, “The explosion of data through AI is happening at massive scale. Having a platform like Estuary, one that works efficiently and can be set up far easier than any other, will help enterprises navigate this new world of AI-driven growth.”
Summary
- Estuary, the right-time data platform backed by M13, unifies batch and streaming pipelines into one system and makes enterprise data movement dependable, cost-predictable and AI-ready.
- Estuary’s BYOC model gives enterprises the agility of SaaS with the control of on-prem, addressing growing needs for data sovereignty, compliance and AI-driven performance.
- Estuary is building the foundational data layer for the AI era. Founders David Yaffe and Johnny Graettinger apply deep infrastructure experience from Google and are partnered by M13’s expertise in software infrastructure and AI enablement.
Read more about David Yaffe
Data Integration in Minutes: A Live Demo with Dave Yaffe, CEO & Founder of Estuary
The History And Future Of Real-time Analytics - With David Yaffe
https://estuary.dev/author/dave/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidyaffe/
Follow Estuary
Read more
The views expressed here are those of the individual M13 personnel quoted and are not the views of M13 Holdings Company, LLC (“M13”) or its affiliates. This content is for general informational purposes only and does not and is not intended to constitute legal, business, investment, tax or other advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters and should not act or refrain from acting on the basis of this content. This content is not directed to any investors or potential investors, is not an offer or solicitation and may not be used or relied upon in connection with any offer or solicitation with respect to any current or future M13 investment partnership. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Unless otherwise noted, this content is intended to be current only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in funds managed by M13, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by M13 is available at m13.co/portfolio.