Seattle-based enterprise data storage startup Qumulo today announced the finalization of $40M in Series B funding in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with additional participation from existing investors Highland Capital, Madrona Venture Group and Valhalla Partners. The funding will be used to accelerate product development and expand Qumulo’s sales and marketing efforts. Still in stealth, Qumulo tackles data management problems specific to storage infrastructures for massive amounts of data. The company aspires to become the “company the world trusts to store, manage, and curate its data forever” as noted in its mission statement. In a phone interview with Cloud Computing Today, Qumulo’s CEO Peter Godman remarked that the condition of possibility for the retention of “data forever” involves the ever depreciating cost of storage-related hardware infrastructures. That said, industry-wide and global cultural expectations to retain data forever create a veritable constellation of problems related to data retrieval and archiving of billions or trillions of files within cost-effective, scalable storage platforms. Today’s funding raise brings the total capital raised by Qumulo to $67M. Sujal Patel, founder of Isilon, the storage vendor acquired by EMC for $2.5 billion, will join Qumulo’s board of directors and complement a leadership team that includes storage experts from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google. As Qumulo emerges from stealth to provide more details of its product offering, the industry should expect dramatic innovation in enterprise-grade scale-out NAS that forthrightly tackles thorny problems related to the curation and organization of massive amounts of data on storage infrastructures designed for big data sets.
Category: Venture Capital
Neo Technology Raises $20M In Series C Funding For Its Neo4j Graph Database Technology
Neo Technology today announced the finalization of $20M in Series C funding. Today’s Series C funding raise was led by Creandum with additional participation from Dawn Capital. Existing investors Fidelity Growth Partners Europe, Sunstone Capital and Conor Venture Partners all participated in the round. The funding will be used to expand sales operations, enhance product development and build the open source community supporting the Neo4j platform and its attendant partner ecosystem. The funding comes hot on the heels of a year of explosive growth for Neo Technologies and its vendor-led open source graph database, Neo4j. Neo Technology’s CEO and co-founder Emil Eifrem remarked on the company’s growth as follows:
There are two strong forces propelling our growth: one is the overall market’s increasing adoption of graph databases in the enterprise. The other is proven market validation of Neo4j to support mission-critical operational applications across a wide range of industries and functions.
Eifrem notes how Neo Technology’s growth has been fueled by increasing enterprise-wide adoption of graph databases in conjunction with Neo4j’s consistent demonstration of its ability to support a variety of production-grade environments. In a phone interview with Cloud Computing Today, Eifrem further remarked how one of the challenges for Neo Technology consists of developing an incisive sales outreach strategy given that almost every enterprise could benefit from the adoption of graphing technologies. Eifrem elaborated that Neo Technology has chosen to tackle the challenge of prioritizing its sales outreach efforts by focusing on use cases that include data-driven recommendations (in e-commerce and social networking, for example), master data management, identity and access management, graph based search, network and IT operations, the internet of things and pricing, while nevertheless remaining open to other client requests and interests. Since the launch of Neo4j 2.0 last January, Neo4j has experienced over 500,000 downloads and boasts thousands of enterprise-grade deployments featuring organizations such as Walmart, eBay, Earthlink, CenturyLink, Pitney Bowes and Cisco. Based on its impressive record in 2014 and the explosive proliferation of use cases for graphing technology, 2015 could well represent an inflection point for Neo Technologies as it consolidates its leadership in the graph database space by using its additional funding to gain more market traction while continuing to educate the industry on the value proposition of adopting Neo4j.
Hampton Creek Raises $90M In Series C Funding For Advanced Analytics-Driven Food Startup
Big data analytics food startup Hampton Creek has raised $90M in Series C funding in a round led by Horizons Ventures and Khosla Ventures with additional participation from Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff and other private investors. Hampton Creek uses advanced analytics to identify plants that enable the production of egg-free food products that contain fewer artificial ingredients, taste better and are healthier than their competitors. The funds will be used to advance its research and development efforts and accelerate the distribution of its products in collaboration with other major food vendors. In particular, Hampton Creek intends to use the funding to expand its market presence in Asia by distributing an eggless scrambled egg product that responds to consumer and watchdog concerns about the lack of sanitary conditions in which eggs are harvested in Asia. To date, Hampton Creek’s products include Just Mayo and Just Cookies. The company intends to release Just Pasta and Just Scrambled in 2015. Meanwhile, on Thursday, multi-billion dollar food conglomerate Unilever recently dropped its October lawsuit against Hampton Creek that claimed Hampton Creek’s Just Mayo, eggless mayonnaise product is not mayonnaise because it lacks eggs. In dropping its lawsuit, Unilver backpedaled and praised “Hampton Creek’s commitment to innovation and its inspired corporate purpose,” while noting the sharing of “a vision with Hampton Creek of a more sustainable world.” Hampton Creek has now raised a total of $120M that includes $23M in Series B funding from earlier this year.
Hortonworks and New Relic Post Impressive Gains In First Day Of IPO Trading
On Friday December 12, Hortonworks finished its first day of trading with a share price of $26.48, roughly 65% more than the IPO price of $16 per share. Hortonworks plans to raise $100M by means of 6,250,000 publicly available shares. Friday’s impressive showing bodes well for the Hadoop infrastructure and analytics market in 2015, particularly given that Hortonworks competitors are gearing up to execute IPOs in 2015 or shortly thereafter. Cloud monitoring and analytics vendor New Relic similarly gained in its first day of trading by rising 48% from $23 per share to $33.02 by the end of the day. The results represented a huge coup for venture capitalist Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital, who serves on the board of directors of both companies. Whereas Hortonworks raised $100M in its IPO, New Relic raised $115M. The real winner in both of these IPOs, however, is Yahoo given that Yahoo owns roughly 20% of the shares of its spin-off Hortonworks and 16.8% of shares of New Relic.
Avi Networks Emerges From Stealth With Cloud Application Delivery Platform And $33M In Funding
Avi Networks today emerged from stealth to announce the general availability of its Cloud Application Delivery Platform. The Avi Networks Cloud Application Delivery Platform leverages a disruptive technology branded the Hyperscale Distributed Resources Architecture (HYDRA) that attempts to bring the application delivery and load balancing technologies enjoyed by internet giants such as Facebook and Google to the modern enterprise. HYDRA takes advantage of software defined networking marked by a separation of the control plane and the data plane in conjunction with distributed microservices that apply a multitude of services such as load balancing and SSL termination to incoming network traffic in parallel. HYDRA also features built-in analytics that give customers real-time visibility into resource consumption specific to applications and swathes of network traffic. The Avi Networks HYDRA-powered Cloud Application Delivery platform empowers enterprises to optimize load balancing and application delivery within private cloud deployments in addition to hybrid cloud infrastructures that additionally take advantage of the services of a public cloud environment to complement an on-premise infrastructure.
Founded by former Cisco executives, Avi Networks has raised a total of $33 million in funding from Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures. In addition to delivering revolutionary load balancing and application delivery technology to the enterprise, the Cloud Application Delivery Platform promises to assist cloud service providers achieve the performance benefits and economies of scale enjoyed by platforms such as Google’s Andromeda platform and Facebook’s Autoscale system. Expect more details about the Cloud Application Delivery Platform to emerge in subsequent months but for now, the application delivery and load balancing space features a new incumbent focused on improving end-user experiences given the proliferation of cloud-based applications that impose new demands on application-delivery infrastructures. Umesh Mahajan, Founder and CEO of Avi Networks, elaborated on the significance of the company’s value proposition by noting that, “In today’s mobile cloud era, the traditional appliance-centric, monolithic application delivery approach doesn’t work anymore,” and as such, the company conceived and operationalized a disruptive application-delivery and load balancing framework that competes with the likes of F5 and Citrix.
Sentient Technologies Raises $103.5M In Series C Funding For Distributed Artificial Intelligence Technology
Artificial intelligence vendor Sentient Technologies recently announced the finalization of $103.5M in Series C funding in a round led by Tata Communications (Hong Kong), existing investor Horizons Ventures and a group of private investors. Sentient’s technology features an artificial intelligence and machine learning platform that operates on distributed datasets to develop actionable business intelligence from disparate, asynchronous data sources. The company’s patent pending technology has thus far been used to develop analytic insights in the financial and healthcare industries. Sentient differentiates itself in the artificial intelligence space by way of its unique ability to scale to process artificial intelligence jobs on millions of nodes in parallel.
Vinod Kumar, MD and CEO of Tata Communications, the company that led the Series C round, remarked on the significance of Sentient Technologies as follows:
As an investor, we share a common vision on the transformative force that massively distributed computing and artificial intelligence can play in helping businesses get insights and solve their most complex big data problems. We see Sentient at the forefront of these technologies and bringing a disruptive approach to cloud based computing services. Furthermore, the scale of our leading global network infrastructure and data center footprint also complements Sentient’s growth plans and will enable its global deployment.
Here, Kumar positions Sentient Technologies as contributing to the “transformative force that massively distributed computing and artificial intelligence” currently plays in revolutionizing the way in which businesses manage big data analytics. Sentient delivers a “disruptive” approach to cloud-based distributed artificial intelligence that benefits from its collaboration with Tata’s global data center and network infrastructure. As such, Sentient participates in a resurgence of artificial intelligence technologies as evinced by IBM’s $100M venture fund in Watson supercomputing, Google’s acquisition of DeepMind technologies for $500M and early stage artificial intelligence startups such as Wit.ai, Idibon, Expect Labs and Prediction IO. Given that Sentient’s Series C funding represents the largest venture round funding investment in an artificial intelligence startup to date, the industry should expect more details of its technology platform and product roadmap to emerge in upcoming months. Sentient’s platform differentiates by way of its distributed artificial intelligence technology and massive ability to scale, although details of its predictive analytics and data management technology have yet to emerge. For now, however, the bottom line is that AI is hot both for investors and prospective customers that are increasingly interested in leveraging iterative machine learning technologies into business operations.
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