Company

Seed stage, pre-product, and specific about it.

Two founders and five engineers. We are building an operated open lakehouse for companies that need what Databricks does but cannot staff a platform team to get it — and we would rather publish what is not built than discover together on call three.

The build order

Items 1 to 13 are a coherent, sellable product. Everything after 13 is expansion, and is genuinely cuttable. One new engine per phase, never two — the most likely way this fails is not competition, it is adding engines faster than seven people can operate them.

01 Control plane, tenancy, projects, git-backed config RUNNING
02 Kubernetes data plane, Karpenter, Kueue, multi-cloud storage RUNNING
03 Catalog and credential vending BUILDING
04 Iceberg only; file upload + Postgres CDC BUILDING
05 DuckDB + Trino + Kyuubi BUILDING
06 Cost attribution BUILDING
07 Pipeline Agent BUILDING
08 Quality Agent PLANNED
09 Router v1 + the differential test harness PLANNED
10 Spark + Celeborn + Spark Connect + Gluten or Comet PLANNED
11 StarRocks PLANNED
12 GCP PLANNED
13 Encryption, masking, policy per engine PLANNED

— the line: everything above is the sellable product —

14 Flink + streaming CDC PLANNED
15 Hudi + Streamer + automated table services PLANNED
16 Analyst Agent + semantic layer PLANNED
17 Repair Agent PLANNED
18 Azure PLANNED
19 BYOC hardening, reverse ETL, sharing PLANNED
20 MLflow, JupyterHub PLANNED

Hudi and Flink are last on purpose. Hudi’s table services are the single largest source of unplanned operational load in the architecture, and Hudi is not offered to any customer until they are automated and proven.

Who this is for

A fit

200–2,000 employees
$20M–$500M revenue
A data team of two to eight
$50K–$500K of cloud data spend
Already on Kubernetes, or willing to be
A regulatory obligation you have to satisfy

Not a fit

Under 50 people
Over 5,000 people — we lose on references and features
Primarily ML-training workloads
On-premises only
No existing cloud spend to compare against
No appetite for Kubernetes

Contact

founders@runninglake.com reaches both founders. For a design-partner slot, the form gets you a faster answer because it asks the three things we would otherwise have to email you about.