- Hungarian cloud-based collection and curation solution Axoflow secures a $2.5 million seed round led by Credo Ventures, 500 Emerging Europe, Notion Capital and several CEE angel investors.
- Among the founders of Axoflow is Balázs Scheidler, the founder of Balabit (a former Hungarian security company), which had a successful exit in 2018.
- Axoflow, leverages the power of syslog-ng and provides solutions for managing and improving data supply chains. Some features include encryption for data in motion and at rest, retention of original data for compliance, and role-based access control with region policies.
Hungarian startup Axoflow, a cloud-based collection and curation solution, has secured a $2.5M seed round led by Credo Ventures, 500 Emerging Europe, Notion Capital and several CEE angel investors, including Jared Schrieber – a US expat living in Hungary who has supported many successful ventures in the country, including Munch, Bindr, and Shrooly.
Axoflow, founded by Balázs Scheidler, Ferenc Hernádi, and Sándor Guba, is a platform that helps businesses control and improve their data supply chains. This allows companies to maximize their observability investments (*observability is the ability to properly collect and manage business data, then make informed decisions using insights from that data). Axoflow has been designed to optimize the entire machine data lifecycle, a critical aspect for both traditional and cloud-based environments.
One of the key solutions provided by Axoflow is structuring the regular and ever-increasing amount of data produced by a company. This eliminates the need for significant expenditures on data collection and storage.
Axoflow’s journey
Before this funding round, Axoflow had received a $400,000 investment from angels, including former Balabit co-founder László Szakál, the Managing Director at Startup Hungary Csongor Bias, and American angel Travis McPeak through a large Western European fund that has requested anonymity.
When asked about his expectation on Axoflow’s growth trajectory post-funding Enis Hulli, General Partner at 500 Emerging Europe, said for The Recursive:
“We firmly believe that the team has the perfect ingredients to finalize PoC, onboard new flagship customers and become a category definer in the space over the next 12-18 months. They have a deep understanding of the space like no other!”
Axoflow started its journey with a capital of $28K (ten million forints). The first twelve employees were given the opportunity to purchase shares in the company. Subsequently, an additional $700,000 was raised, largely covered by the four founders.
Axoflow’s Technologies
Axoflow’s technologies allow businesses to observe and control their data collection infrastructure, manage the entire observability data lifecycle, and unify on-premise and cloud observability. The platform also offers solutions to resolve common formatting and other data issues, classify and enrich data for more value, and transform data to the right format for consumers.
Additionally, Axoflow’s technology preserves and integrates contextual metadata, processes data right at the edge, and stores and inspects data before collection. The platform is secure by design, with features like encryption for data in motion and at rest, retention of original data for compliance, and role-based access control with region policies.
syslog-ng, an open-source, versatile, and highly scalable system logging application, is a key part of Axoflow’s technology stack. Created more than twenty years ago as a replacement for syslogd, syslog-ng has gained popularity in open source communities and has become a standard building block of logging infrastructures.
Balázs Scheidler’s Legacy
Balázs Scheidler, Axoflow’s co-founder, is a well-known figure in the Hungarian tech world. As the co-founder of Balabit (a former Hungarian security company), he made headlines in the European tech scene with his exit in 2018. Although the official figures of the deal that saw Balabit sold to One Identity are not known, it was estimated at the time that Balabit was sold for $100M.
In an interview with Forbes Hungary, Scheidler shared some insights into Axoflow’s target market. “We will sell to security departments, because they are not yet really using new technologies, especially the cloud”, he said.
