Platfora, a U.S.-based software company which develops business intelligence and analytics platforms based on Apache's open source Hadoop framework, recently raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by Battery Ventures, along with Andreessen Horowitz and Sutter Hill Ventures. This brings Platfora's total funding to $25.7 million in just over a year.
The company held a Series A funding round in September 2011, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from In-Q-Tel (News - Alert), Inc, raising $5.7 million.
The company first released its scale-out in-memory business intelligence platform in October, which harnesses the scale, speed and HTML5 flexibility of Hadoop. Until this release, Hadoop had largely only been used to perform batch processing. However, Platfora founder and CEO Ben Werther claims that the framework can provide data warehousing and business intelligence better than traditional legacy technologies.
"Everyone talks about the promise of big data, but the real innovation lies in the data agility and exploration made possible by Hadoop," said Werther in a statement. "Businesses want immediate answers — they cannot wait days or months for insight into their own data. Unless businesses can explore and interact with this data, the promise of Hadoop is lost."
This approach aimed at disrupting the traditional methods is fairly unique in the Hadoop space, in which most companies provide the core Hadoop software and then partner with legacy vendors. As is usual in business, this bold approach is turning heads and, according to Werther, customers and investors are responding positively.
The fact that this funding round went from preliminary discussions to signed term sheets in three weeks is a pretty good measure of Werther's claims. Meanwhile, venture capitalists project Hadoop will take about 20 percent of the $30-billion legacy business intelligence market.
"As new software models continue to change the data center and drive better business outcomes, Platfora's approach removes the requirement for a data warehouse and the accompanying limitations," said Scott Weiss, partner, Andreessen Horowitz and Platfora board member. "Platfora up-ends traditional business intelligence, unlocks the potential of Hadoop and puts the power of data in the hands of the end user."
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Edited by Rachel Ramsey