Amsterdam-based Polars, the company behind the fast-growing open-source data processing library, has raised €18M (~$21M) in a Series A led by Accel, with Bain Capital Partners and several angel investors also participating.
The dutch startup began in 2020 as a side project by software engineer Ritchie Vink, who grew frustrated with the performance limits of Python’s Pandas library. By rebuilding a query engine in Rust, Vink delivered a tool that could handle large datasets far faster.
Five years later, Polars has been downloaded more than 24 million times and is used by data scientists and teams in industries from finance to logistics. Its combination of speed and usability caught the attention of investors, but the Series A is really about building a business around that open-source success.
Building a scalable platform
The company has now launched Polars Cloud, a managed service for running queries at scale, and Polars Distributed, a new distributed engine designed to support petabyte-scale workloads. The latter, currently in public beta, will be the main focus of the new funding.
“With Polars Distributed, we’re closing the scale gap between Pandas and Spark,” said co-founder and CEO Ritchie Vink. “It’s about enabling teams to move seamlessly from processing small datasets on a laptop to running enterprise workloads in the cloud.”
Accel partner Zhenya Loginov, who led the round, added:
“Polars stood out because it solved a massive, obvious problem — existing tools were simply outdated. By bridging the gap between Pandas and Spark, the company is positioned to serve a very large market of enterprises struggling with data complexity.”
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Taking on Spark — and Databricks
Polars Distributed puts the startup into direct competition with Apache Spark, the open-source framework that spawned $43B giant Databricks. Unlike Pandas, which remains a standalone open-source library without a commercial layer, the firm now has a clear monetization path with managed services and enterprise support.
Co-founder and former Xomnia CTO Chiel Peters emphasized that the company’s roadmap is about more than Rust performance jokes:
“Our vision is to make Polars the go-to data engine for any scale — from a single machine to massive distributed clusters. This round gives us the resources to deliver on that.”
What’s next
With the fresh capital, the startup will expand engineering on its distributed systems, scale Polars Cloud for enterprise adoption, and build out go-to-market operations.
The startup’s trajectory — from side project to widely adopted library to enterprise-ready platform — also offers a template for other open-source founders.
As Accel’s Loginov put it:
“Polars became successful because it tackled a very large, very painful problem head-on. That’s the lesson for open-source entrepreneurs: find a gap where existing tech is failing by miles, and build something radically better.”
