Polars, the Amsterdam-based company behind the high-performance open source data processing library of the same name, has raised €18 million ($21 million) in a Series A round led by Accel, with participation from Bain Capital Partners and angel investors. The funding comes as Polars expands its roadmap from a popular open source tool into a scalable commercial business.

Founded by Ritchie Vink during COVID as a pet project, Polars was created to overcome the limitations of Pandas, the widely used Python data library. Built in Rust, Polars quickly gained traction among data scientists for its superior speed and efficiency in handling large datasets.

The Series A round will support the growth of Polars Cloud, a managed platform enabling scalable cloud-based queries, and Polars Distributed, a distributed engine designed for petabyte-scale data processing currently in public beta. These new offerings position Polars to compete with established players like Apache Spark and Databricks.

Accel partner Zhenya Loginov noted that while rewriting tools in Rust can improve performance, true business sustainability requires building robust commercial products—a vision reflected in Polars’ current expansion. With over 24 million downloads, Polars is now transitioning from open source success to enterprise-grade data solutions.