If you’ve ever tried untangling the mess that is enterprise data infrastructure, you know it feels less like architecture and more like a hostage negotiation, cloud lock-in, bloated legacy stacks, and vendors acting like gatekeepers to your own data. Enter Ryft, the Tel Aviv, and New York, based startup that didn’t just emerge from stealth, they kicked the door open.
Founded in 2024 by a trio with résumés sharper than Occam’s Razor, Yossi Reitblat (CEO), Yuval Yogev (CTO), and Guy Gadon (VP R&D), Ryft is the first fully managed, Apache Iceberg, native cloud data management platform designed for enterprises that are tired of building castles on vendor-owned sand. All three founders cut their teeth in Israeli intelligence, where the stakes are binary: solve it or watch it implode. That background shows. Ryft doesn’t peddle hype. They ship scalable, production-grade lakehouses with built-in governance, optimization, and compliance, so data teams can stop firefighting and start building.
Yesterday, Ryft announced an $8M seed round led by Index Ventures, with backup from Bessemer Venture Partners, founding team members from Wiz, and seasoned operators from Zscaler, CrowdStrike, Cisco, and Confluent. If you’re wondering how a fresh team bagged a cap table that reads like a zero-trust Avengers roster, it’s simple: the product is real, the pain point is massive, and their timing is deadly accurate.
The platform is Iceberg-native to its core, no retrofits, no duct tape. It brings petabyte-scale power with multi-cloud agility and no vendor shackles. Enterprise teams from finance to gaming are already in production, running cleaner data pipelines without sacrificing ownership or performance. And Ryft’s playbook? Strip complexity. Empower builders. Leave lift-and-shift in the rearview and deliver true data independence.
The funding will supercharge engineering and GTM, pushing expansion into London, Boston, and San Francisco while tripling headcount by the end of the year. Expect feature drops like automated data catalogs, semantic layers, and multi-cluster orchestration. And yeah, AI-ready accelerators are on deck, because your data isn’t just for dashboards anymore, it’s fuel for machine learning, risk modeling, and next-gen analytics.
In a market racing past $100B by 2028, Ryft isn’t playing defense, they’re owning the perimeter and the protocol. And in a world obsessed with control, governance, and cost transparency, their approach isn’t just smart. It’s inevitable.
Congrats to Yossi Reitblat, Yuval Yogev, and Guy Gadon for building what legacy vendors pray you’ll never find: a platform that frees your data without fighting your stack.
