SQream Technologies: A Little Startup Doing BIG Things

“Get new!” This is what we say at SQream Technologies when there’s something new going on in the office. For example, there are always new languages being spoken at SQream. We have people speaking in English. We have people speaking in Russian, Spanish and French. We even have some people speaking Hebrew, believe it or not! We also have native C++, Haskell and CUDA speakers (and a few more), but in our vocabulary database, the lowest common ground here is simply binary: 0s and 1s. Now you might be wondering, “Don’t you guys have a good story behind the company?” Well, I’m glad that you asked because we actually do have our own version of the “mythological eureka.”
The story behind SQream Technologies began in May 2010 during a Seedcamp  event held in Tel Aviv, Israel. About 200 people attended – mentors, VC’s, angels – mainly people looking to help entrepreneurs jump start their business ideas. This is how I met Kostya Varakin, the Co-Founder and CTO of SQream Technologies.
Kostya worked for Intel at their high performance testing unit before founding SQream Technologies. The story, in a nutshell, involves Kostya banging his head and wondering how to get out of his box and solve his real problem. Kostya decided to present at the Seedcamp event in Tel Aviv.
Kostya had an idea called, “Gpustream”. He presented this at Seedcamp and unfortunately no one understood what he was talking about. The audience lost Kostya immediately. I, however, was intrigued by Kostya’s idea, but all I understood during his speech was “GPU”.
After the event, I took Kostya aside and asked him to explain his startup idea to me. I realized that Kostya was dealing with a problem that I had been trying to solve since 1996 which involved GPUs. I was looking for a disruptive startup at the time and I told Kostya that he needed a CEO in order to get his idea out on the table. Kostya had the guts to ask me for help and we scheduled to meet for coffee a few weeks later to see what ideas we could come up with and…eureka – Why not do generic SQL on GPUs effectively?! I told Kostya that I wanted to create a database around GPUs and I gave him a task which would take about 3 months to complete. Kostya finished this project in just 3 weeks though, leaving me very impressed. This is also the time when I found out about Jake, a world class Haskell guy. Jake was working with Kostya on his project and I went to London to meet him to see if he actually existed.
I met with Kostya again and he agreed to move his idea to databases and I agreed to become the CEO. Three months later, in September 2010, Kostya and I received our first round of funds and SQream Technologies was formed. My decision to join Kostya was life changing because I was also considering to move to Australia during this time, yet I stayed in Tel Aviv to focus on the development of SQream.

And that is how SQream Technologies was conceived – three years ago in 2010 at a coffee shop in Tel Aviv. And the rest is history, or actually the present…We are the SQream Team and we are currently making this startup dream come true. Our vision is to dominate the high-performance Big Data market by creating the world’s fastest analytic database. At SQream Technologies, we are going to show all of the Big Data giants that with a bit of “Hutzpa” we can do BIG things, even if we are only a small startup from Ramat-Gan.
Contact us for a free demo and to learn more about our innovative software. Also be sure to follow us on twitter, like our Facebook page and find us on Google+. Leave your comments below too – we can’t wait to hear what you have to say!