“Forabilis supported us in our most important milestones during our 8-year journey, including messaging, positioning, and go-to-market strategy.”
| Company | Upsolver |
| Industry | Data Infrastructure |
| Challenge | Early positioning in adtech wasn’t generating sustainable traction. The technology was strong. The market fit wasn’t. |
| What changed | Forabilis helped reposition Upsolver around its core strength: making streaming data pipelines fast and manageable without armies of specialist engineers. |
| Impact | $40M+ raised. A market position built on a problem that every data-driven company was already feeling. |
Adtech around 2018 and 2019 was not a comfortable place to build a data infrastructure company. Privacy regulation was tightening. Smaller players were consolidating or exiting. The open, high-growth dynamics that had made programmatic advertising feel like an opportunity were contracting fast, replaced by tighter rules, thinner margins, and a more defensive industry posture.
Upsolver had built genuinely strong technology to solve data pipeline problems in that environment. But staying tied to adtech as the primary market was becoming a ceiling, not a strategy. The product was capable of much more than the category suggested.
At the same time, something was happening across almost every data-driven organization. The move to cloud data lakes was accelerating, driven by the promise of affordable, flexible, scalable storage. What companies discovered when they got there was considerably more painful than the promise.
Building and maintaining streaming data pipelines in the cloud required deep specialist engineering skills that most teams didn’t have in abundance. Data engineers were spending the majority of their time on pipeline plumbing: getting data from source to destination, in the right shape, at acceptable performance, reliably and repeatedly. It was necessary work, but it was slow, expensive, and it consumed the people who should have been working on higher-value problems.
This was the exact problem Upsolver’s technology was already solving. The platform made cloud data pipeline engineering dramatically faster and more accessible, without requiring deep Spark expertise or months of manual build work. It just wasn’t being positioned or sold that way.
The pivot wasn’t a reinvention. It was a reframe. Forabilis helped Upsolver sharpen the positioning around the data infrastructure problem and build the messaging and go-to-market motion to match. The story moved from a narrow adtech application to a broad data infrastructure play, aimed squarely at the engineering teams and data organizations that were losing weeks of productive capacity to pipeline complexity.
A much bigger market. A much more urgent conversation. And one where Upsolver’s actual capabilities were a genuine answer to a problem buyers already felt and could articulate.
The repositioning opened the door to the kind of commercial momentum the adtech framing had been limiting. With a clear story pointed at the right buyers, investor conviction followed. Over $40M raised in total, from investors who saw a company solving a real, widespread infrastructure problem with technology that could demonstrate its own value.
The lesson here isn’t complicated. A product built to solve a hard problem can stay stuck if it’s being presented to the wrong buyers in the wrong language. When the story caught up with the technology, the market responded accordingly.
If your technology is stronger than the market you’re currently selling into, the reposition is often closer than it looks. Let’s talk.
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