Canadian-founded, San Francisco-based Bemi aims to streamline how back-end developers use their databases to power event-driven systems. The software startup has announced nearly $1.2 million CAD in total funding to fuel its early efforts with more Canadian engineering talent.
Last month, Bemi secured $872,000 in pre-seed financing led by Night Capital with support from existing backer Mucker Capital, new investors Niche Capital, Materialized View Capital, and angels such as Xata founder Monica Sarbu to fuel its product development plans.
Combined with $309,000 in previously unannounced initial funding from Mucker and AngelList that closed in October 2023, which was also raised via a simple agreement for future equity, this fresh capital brings Bemi’s total funding to nearly $1.2 million.
“Our vision is to become the standard platform to track data changes for businesses that run on Postgres.”
Founded in 2023 by two Canadians, CEO Arjun Lall and CTO Evgeny Li, Bemi describes itself as an automatic audit trail for Postgres. Postgres, or PostgreSQL, is a popular open-source database management system. “Our vision is to become the standard platform to track data changes for businesses that run on Postgres,” Lall told BetaKit in an exclusive interview.
With its open-source software, Bemi aims to help businesses do this without allocating significant engineering resources to building and maintaining that infrastructure in-house.
Lall and Li previously worked together as software engineers at Toronto-based event platform Universe (acquired in 2015 by Ticketmaster) and have stayed close friends since then.
According to Lall, Li went on to build data-tracking infrastructure currently used to manage $124 billion worth of assets while working as a principal software engineer at AngelList. He also created open-source data libraries used by companies like Netflix, GitLab, and Alibaba. Meanwhile, Lall worked on developer infrastructure at Meta following some time with Nextdoor as a software engineer.
“Both of us faced this challenge of the infrastructure and application layers of the database throughout our careers,” Lall said. The pair eventually realized other big companies were contending with the same problem, which Lall claimed required considerable engineering resources and expertise to address, noting that some companies spent months trying to build solutions like Bemi internally but ultimately failed due to the associated difficulty.
“It was also incredibly difficult to maintain this infrastructure and make it easy to use for developers,” Lall said. “We realized that this was actually a very big opportunity.”
Enter Bemi, which the pair launched last October. “Bemi integrates with Postgres to provide a reliable audit trail, essential for compliance, building customer activity feeds, and troubleshooting data issues,” Lall continued. “Bemi also enriches these data changes with automatic metadata—like which user made the change and which endpoint was used—providing additional context.”
Night Capital founder and general partner Kevin Carter described Lall and Li as “incredibly sharp and ambitious founders building in a massive market.”
“‘Show me everything that has changed about this data in the past week’ is a very difficult thing to do, but it is critically important,” Carter told BetaKit
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Carter expects the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) to further increase demand for real-time streaming, and by extension, Bemi’s solution. This is something Lall said Bemi is already seeing given how companies need to “analyze, synchronize, and apply” data changes immediately to boost the accuracy of their AI models.
Lall views Bemi’s developer experience as a differentiator. “Some companies will tackle this only at the database level, or other solutions will be only at the application level, but where we come in is [we] marry these two approaches of the application context and the database events, and this is a big step into making things much more developer-friendly,” he said.
Today, Li lives in Ottawa, while Lall, who is from Toronto, is based in San Francisco. According to Lall, Bemi plans to hire primarily in Canada going forward, and he noted that the startup is looking to add some Canadian engineering talent over the near term.
Night Capital’s Kevin Carter described Lall and Li as “incredibly sharp and ambitious founders building in a massive market.”
Since its launch in February, Bemi has been working to improve and scale its infrastructure. According to Lall, the startup’s existing offering provides a reliable audit trail.
Over the coming months, Bemi aims to expand its functionality to power event-driven architectures as a whole, and layer in on-premise support, multi-region hosting, and other capabilities for large companies.
Bemi is focusing on medium-sized and larger businesses, and the startup has seen some traction serving healthtech, climate tech, supply and logistics companies, including KLog.
While other businesses are tackling different parts of this problem, Lall says, Bemi’s biggest competition is do-it-yourself solutions, which require lots of in-house resources and expertise.
Feature image courtesy Bemi.