Company
Built on the coast of cooling lava.
Basalt started in Reykjavík in 2021. Three infrastructure engineers were tired of nightly batch jobs that failed at 2 a.m. and answered questions a day late. So they built a data layer that sets every event the moment it lands.
Founded
2021
Team
84 people
Offices
Reykjavík · Berlin · New York
Manifesto
Basalt forms when lava meets cold air and cracks into columns, straight and evenly spaced. Data should cool the same way. Events arrive hot and messy. We give them shape within milliseconds, keep every crack traceable, and let you stand on the result while the next eruption is still running.
Ari, Robin and Sam · Reykjavík, 2021
Timeline
Six years, one log.
2021
Founded in Reykjavík
Three engineers leave their pager rotations and write the first append-only log in a rented room off Laugavegur.
2022
First customer and seed round
Orbitly moves its fraud features off a nightly Spark job. A $6M seed funds the first streaming join engine.
2023
General availability and SOC 2
Basalt opens to every team with Postgres CDC and Kafka sources, and passes its SOC 2 Type II audit in the same quarter.
2024
Series A and 20 regions
A $32M Series A takes the network from 4 to 20 regions and opens the Berlin office.
2025
Time travel and edge replicas
Any table can be queried as of any second in the last 30 days, and reads follow users to the nearest replica.
2026
38 regions, 2,400 teams
Basalt now sets 2.1 billion events a day for 2,400 teams, from Reykjavík to Singapore.
Values
Three rules we still follow.
01
Speed
Latency is a feature
Every pull request that touches the query path ships with a p99 number. If it gets slower, it does not merge, however good the idea.
02
Simplicity
Delete glue code
Our best release removed 38,000 lines from a customer's repo. We measure progress by the cron jobs, retries and DAGs people get to throw away.
03
Clarity
Write it down
Decisions start as a two-page doc anyone can comment on. Across three timezones, a clear memo beats a meeting every time.
Team
The people on call.
Ari Magnusson
Co-founder · CEO
Robin Achterberg
Co-founder · CTO
Sam Okafor
Co-founder · Chief Architect
Kai Lindqvist
VP Engineering
Jordan Reyes
Head of Design
Noa Bergström
Developer Relations
Alex Thorsen
Staff Engineer, Storage
River Castellanos
Customer Engineering
Backed by
Patient capital, sharp questions.
Hraun Ventures
Northlight
Fjord&Field
tidewater
Ledger
Ash Collective
