They left Microsoft after two decades and raised $70 million to compete with data giants

Four former Microsoft engineers founded Edelbyte, a startup that developed a platform for storing, searching, and analyzing enterprise data, and raised $70 million led by Sequoia and Quiet Capital at a $500 million valuation.

Four senior former Microsoft engineers, who worked together for over a decade on developing the tech giant's data infrastructure, unveiled today (Wednesday) the startup Edelbyte, which they founded about a year ago and has so far raised $70 million. The company developed a platform for storing, searching, and analyzing large amounts of enterprise data, aiming to compete with major players in the data infrastructure market, amid the growing loads created by artificial intelligence (AI) agents. The funding was raised in two rounds: a $25 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Greenoaks and Swish Ventures, the venture capital fund of Omri Caspi, and a $45 million Series A round led by Quiet Capital. Edelbyte was founded in November 2025 by Avner Ahroni (CEO), Evgeny Rayzik (CTO), Alexander Slutsky (VP Engineering), and Yoni Leibowitz (VP Platform Engineering). All four worked at Microsoft for nearly two decades each. Rayzik and Slutsky were part of the original founding team of Kusto, a data analysis system that became the technological basis of Azure Data Explorer. The company currently employs about 40 people in Israel, Europe, and the US, and its clients include Fortune 500 organizations.