Paul Sawers 
Meltano, the data integration company that spun off from GitLab last year, today unveiled version 2.0 of its platform. And to fuel the transition to what it calls an “open-source Dataops operating system,” the company also announced new seed funding of $8.2 million.
Meltano, which debuted in-house at GitLab in 2018, evolved into what’s known as an “Extract, Load, Transform” (ELT) platform that helps companies “extract” raw data from disparate silos (e.g., multiple SaaS apps). “load” that data into a warehouse or file storage system; and “transform” the data into a standardized format that is easier to analyze.
Meltano occupies a broader realm of data integration that spans myriad established companies, from proprietary players like Fivetran to open-source newcomers like Airbyte. Meltano, for its part, sits squarely in the open source realm, promising flexibility and extensibility for data engineers – it can be hosted wherever they choose and accessed via their own orchestration tools or via Meltano’s own web interface.
Attached with duct tape
With Meltano 2.0, officially available today, Meltano ends the era of “taped data platforms” and offers a comprehensive product that allows teams to create and manage their “ideal” data stack.
This means Meltano goes beyond ELT and packages tools from across the data stack – from integration to business intelligence (BI) and analytics.
“This not only allows a team’s data pipelines to be managed like a software project, but their entire end-to-end data platform from EL (Extract & Load) to BI,” Douwe Maan, CEO of Meltano, told VentureBeat.
While the Meltano platform is an open source product in its own right – released under a permissive MIT license – it actually takes a modular approach and relies on a variety of third party open source tools such as dbt, a command line tool for data transformation ; Apache Airflow for orchestration; and Singer, an “open source standard” for writing data integration scripts. And earlier this year, Meltano introduced support for the Great Expectations open data quality standard.
The company had always planned to support Apache Superset for data visualization and with version 2.0 this plan has now come true as users can now install, configure, integrate, test and deploy Superset directly from Meltano. In addition, Meltano also supports alternative data visualization and BI tools such as Lightdash and Evidence.dev.
“That makes Meltano the MVP [minimal viable product] our Dataops OS vision and the first major step in tackling the complexity and fragility of today’s modern data stack, by bringing in much-needed infrastructure to hold it all together and software development best practices to enable rapid iteration with confidence” , Maan continued.
Elsewhere, Meltano has now expanded the scope of its plugin hub, allowing users to find not just supported EL connectors, but all the open source tools to power their data stack.
“We intend for this to become a library of all open-source data tools in the ecosystem, with Meltano being the easiest way to install and use them together,” Maan said.
Finally, Meltano removed a number of old features, such as B. its legacy BI/visualization functionality, which it developed in-house, which is now making way for the third-party open-source incarnations mentioned above.
From GitLab to GitHub
The release of version 2.0 also comes shortly after Meltano migrated from its original home on GitLab to GitHub to support continued growth in the open source community. Simply put, GitHub has a wider reach in terms of community-driven data tool projects.
“GitLab is a great tool for collaborating within companies, especially remote ones, and we’ve obviously cared about it since we were born there,” said Maan. “But as our growth accelerates and the community diversifies, moving to GitHub just makes sense.”
When it officially forked from GitLab last year, Meltano announced a $4.2 million seed funding round led by Alphabet’s VC arm GV, along with a series of angel investments from the likes of WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and early Google contributor Ram Shriram. Meltano has now increased that seed round to a total of $12.4 million, with Venrock leading the additional raise and GV, Uncorrelated Ventures and Data Tech Fund all participating.
