When ZincSearch founder Prabhat Sharma worked as a solution architect at AWS, helping clients deploy many tools on top of AWS infrastructure services. He noted that most of the solutions designed to help companies search log data were from a different era, and those that weren’t didn’t really catch on.
He decided it was time to build a more modern alternative, and last August he started fiddling with an idea. “I looked around, and then I saw that there were some people who had tried to build a few things. But none of them were really good enough. So then I thought let’s give it a try and see if I can build something,
He spent several months developing what would become ZincSearch. In December he did it on GitHub, and was happily surprised to find it was gaining some traction. The largest incumbent in this space is Elastic, makers of ElasticSearch, a publicly traded company founded in 2012. He wanted to build something that was a modern alternative to that tool without the overhead he noticed when he was at Amazon. So he set out to find a single binary that would set up quickly and wouldn’t use a lot of RAM.
He believes the solution he built is an improvement over what’s out there, and it seems users agreed. The launch sparked some discussion about: Hacker News and redditand quickly built up 2000 stars on GitHub – today the tool is approaching 8,000 stars, a sign that people like it.
This has not gone unnoticed in risk 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 left his job at Amazon to launch ZincSearch as a company.
The startup is still very early and still a work in progress as an alpha project, but Sharma has big plans. “Right now it’s still in alpha, but I plan to have a general release in three to six months and most likely offer a cloud service by the end of the year,” he said.
As he finalizes the administrative aspects of the legal creation of the company, which is currently only a few months old, he plans to hire six people by the end of the year to finalize the open source project and launch the cloud version. to launch. As a first-time founder just putting the first pieces of the company together, he’s only just starting to think about hiring and hiring diverse employees, but he knows diverse teams perform better, and he says he’s looking for ways to make that happen.
The company announced a $3.6 million seed investment to 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.
