Open-source data movement company Airbyte is launching additional connectors to help enterprises better utilize their data in the age of AI without compromising data sovereignty.
The San Francisco-based startup announced on Thursday that it’s releasing a host of new capabilities designed to enable customers to securely move corporate data without tapping SaaS applications. The new features include support for transferring unstructured data out of applications like Google Drive and SharePoint and compatibility with Apache Iceberg, an open-source format for large analytic tables.
Airbyte is also launching a connector bundle for enterprise customers that includes data connector pipelines for applications such as NetSuite, SAP, ServiceNow, and Workday.
Michel Tricot, the co-founder and CEO of Airbyte, said that the beauty of these new features is that they give enterprises additional ways to extract and utilize their internal data, including for AI applications on-premise. They also provide an alternative to AI services that might put customers at risk of having their data exposed to third parties, he continued.
“Fortune 500s like Airbyte because they can have the flexibility and the efficiency of a tool, a piece of infrastructure, but also, they have full control over where the data is moving and from what system,” Tricot said. “They are the only ones actually looking at the pipes. No one else can look at the pipes beside[s] them.”
Tricot added that because Airbyte customers have full visibility into these data pipelines, they can go in and remove sensitive knowledge, like employee compensation information, from the data before it reaches its final destination.
“One thing I like to say is, don’t give away your first-party data for intelligence,” Tricot said. “That is a bad trade. I think a lot of execs and companies are aware of that. There is so much noise about, oh, I don’t want this [AI model] to have access to my data when I’m chatting with the [model], and it makes sense, because now people are just putting their most sensitive data into this system. So we want to make sure that it’s kept protected within […] their infrastructure.”
Tricot thinks support for Iceberg is one of the highlights of the company’s new feature set. Iceberg gives companies the ability to move their data into a data lakehouse, he said, creating a single “source of truth” that works with numerous applications.
“[Iceberg is] compatible with Databricks, it’s compatible with Bitquery, it’s compatible with Snowflake, and it’s compatible with new AI apps,” Tricot said. “So it’s really being compatible with this portable schema.”
Airbyte was founded in 2020 by Tricot and Jean Lafleur, the company’s COO. Airbyte has more than 7,000 enterprise customers, including Monday.com, Invesco, and Calendly, and around 250,000 installations. The startup has raised more than $181 million in venture capital from firms such as Coatue, Accel, and Benchmark, among many others.
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