When 3 engineers walk out of Palantir, the market notices. When those same 3 build a company that makes GPUs quit loafing around and actually earn their keep, investors wire cash. Spiral just locked $22M across Seed + Series A. Amplify Partners led the Seed, General Catalyst stepped in for the A. Add Microsoft, Snowflake and Palantir backing their Vortex file format, and suddenly you’re not just scaling, you’re warping the curve.
Will Manning, Nicholas Gates and Robert Kruszewski founded Spiral in Dec 2022 to attack a flaw everyone tolerated too long. Data infrastructure was built for humans, dashboards, PDFs, analysts with eye strain. AI doesn’t crave pie charts; it wants raw fuel at machine scale. Spiral calls this the “Third Age of Data.” The bottleneck isn’t brains or compute, it’s pipes. That’s why today’s H100 GPUs sit idle ~70% of the time. Feed them right and they rip through 4M images/sec. Spiral’s mission is making that baseline, not a miracle.
The star is Vortex. It takes Parquet’s compression ratios and blows past its speed. Scans 10–20x faster. Writes 5–10x faster. Random access reads 100–200x faster. These aren’t marketing numbers; they’re physics. Microsoft proved it when they ran Apache Spark workloads with Vortex in Apache Iceberg, runtime dropped 30%. TUM’s database group stamped it “cutting edge” in a research paper. That’s academic rigor, not PR gloss.
And Vortex isn’t locked in Spiral’s basement. They donated it to the Linux Foundation in June ‘25, where it jumped from Sandbox to Incubation by Aug. Neutral governance, open community, contributions flying in from academia and industry. Technical steering now includes Wes McKinney (pandas, Apache Arrow) and Andy Pavlo (CMU databaseology). That’s validation you don’t rent, it’s earned.
The founders’ résumés explain why they’re playing at this altitude. Will Manning built Palantir Foundry to exabyte scale. Nicholas Gates sharpened at Palantir, Goldman Sachs and Citadel, where milliseconds = millions. Robert Kruszewski, First Class from Imperial, spent 7 yrs at Palantir turning deployments into working reality. Based in NY and London, they’re not building a startup, they’re laying global infrastructure.
The $22M fuels Spiral’s push into enterprises where AI engineers waste >10% of their time wrangling infrastructure instead of building models. Markets in computer vision, robotics and multimodal AI are desperate for throughput and governance that won’t choke. Spiral sells oxygen to organizations suffocating under their own data.
Lesson: infrastructure isn’t plumbing, it’s the battlefield. In the Third Age of Data, the players who feed machines instead of people will own the future. Judging by who’s writing checks, Spiral is already holding position.
