Polars: Transforming data processing on modern hardware
Data engineers, analysts, and quantitative researchers are some of the smartest people on the planet. It’s therefore quite surprising that many of them still use data frameworks that were developed over a decade ago, when single-core processors were the norm and most data jobs required an unwieldy cluster of machines due to RAM limitations. Modern hardware allows for much faster, cheaper solutions that are straightforward to deploy and seamlessly move data jobs from one machine to a small and powerful cluster. Using old data frameworks with this hardware is like riding a horse on the highway.
That’s exactly what Ritchie Vink and Chiel Peters built with Polars. Polars launched in 2020 as an open-source project built to fully exploit modern hardware. Written in Rust and designed to run across every core of a CPU, Polars can perform in seconds what other frameworks require minutes to process. Its engine incorporates techniques drawn from database research, such as lazy evaluation and native query optimisation, but combines them with a simple, consistent API that feels intuitive for data practitioners. Feedback from data scientists and developers echoes this: we’ve heard from users who often say they came for the speed, but stayed for the syntax.
The impact has been extraordinary. In just a few years, Polars has grown to more than 23M downloads a month, with adoption stretching from solo researchers to engineering teams at some of the world’s largest enterprises. It has become the default choice for Python-based data work in fields as varied as finance, logistics, and life sciences. The community has embraced it not just as a faster library, but as a tool that reshapes how data processing is done. In 2023, Polars launched as a company.
With this Series A, Polars is building out its team and preparing to scale globally. There is once-in-a-generation enthusiasm for Polars from developers around the world, and now Ritchie, Chiel, and the Polars team are preparing to take the next step and launch Polars’ first commercial product: Polars Cloud, a fully managed platform and distributed engine that allows workloads to scale effortlessly from a laptop to a cluster, without the rewrites or migrations that legacy frameworks still demand. This landmark product will scale the Polars offering for the largest enterprises with the biggest datasets.
We believe Polars represents a new standard in data processing. Its speed and usability have already set it apart from legacy frameworks, and its ability to challenge entrenched incumbents shows just how strong the opportunity is. Ritchie has shown remarkable technical vision and commitment to execution, and together with Chiel, he is now building a company capable of redefining how data is processed at scale.
We’re thrilled to welcome Ritchie, Chiel, and the Polars team to the Accel family.
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