Altiscale Raises $30 Million in Series B Funding

PALO ALTO, Calif., Dec. 9 — Altiscale, Inc., a leading innovator in Hadoop-as-a-Service (HaaS) solutions, today announced it has raised $30 million in Series B funding. This latest round of funding is led by Northgate, with participation from previous investors Sequoia Capital and General Catalyst Partners. This funding round brings total investment in Altiscale to $42 million. These resources will be used to extend the company’s lead within the HaaS market segment, one it pioneered. More specifically, they will be used to support the company’s rapidly growing customer base, and will bolster the company’s marketing, sales and product development efforts.

“Hadoop holds tremendous promise for the enterprise, but it remains extremely complex. This complexity makes the Hadoop market more susceptible to disruption than the enterprise application market was by SaaS,” said Brent Jones, managing director at Northgate. “We are excited to lead this round for Altiscale as the company is addressing a huge market need with a faster and easier model for Hadoop adoption, and the customer validation proves it’s working.”

“We’re extremely pleased to work with Northgate and our previous investors, Sequoia and General Catalyst,” said Raymie Stata, Altiscale’s founder and CEO. “Our vision is to deliver the most efficient and straightforward solution for any organization that wants to leverage the transformative power of Hadoop. The simple truth is that businesses don’t want to cope with Hadoop’s complexity. They just want the insights that can be used to improve their business. We enable them to focus on generating those insights and not worry about the underlying infrastructure.”

When compared to other Hadoop cloud offerings, Altiscale delivers three significant benefits that differentiate it from both on-premise and other cloud offerings:

• Altiscale Delivers the Industry’s Best Performance: Customers receive levels of performance that are 5-10x faster than any other alternative, including on-premises and other cloud solutions. Altiscale has achieved these levels of performance by building the industry’s only cloud infrastructure purpose-built and optimized to run Hadoop. This purpose-built Hadoop infrastructure also yields a dramatic reduction in job failures, resulting in fewer retries and faster job completion. Finally, Altiscale’s team of Hadoop veterans from Yahoo, Google, and other Web-scale firms monitor and manage the Altiscale Data Cloud service around-the-clock to ensure that all resources are always running at peak performance.
• Altiscale Provides the Industry’s Best Time-to-Value: The Altiscale Data Cloud delivers value in days versus months when compared to other solutions. Altiscale eliminates the complex and time-consuming steps of procuring and provisioning hardware, installing and configuring Hadoop, and managing Hadoop clusters in production. Altiscale even provides much faster time-to-value than other cloud solutions, which stop short of providing full service, by addressing issues that customers run into in production, such as job failures, resource contention, performance optimization, and infrastructure upgrades.
• Altiscale has the Industry’s Lowest Total Cost of Ownership: With Altiscale, customers do not have to make capital outlays to buy hardware or software or pay personnel to deal with the complexities of setting up and operating a Hadoop cluster in production. Altiscale’s team of experts run, update, and manage the entire Hadoop implementation in the cloud and customers simply pay for the capacity that they use. Furthermore, Altiscale provides users expert help-desk support for Hadoop, such as help structuring queries to be fast and effective. The combination of zero capital expense, low management costs, and outstanding end-user support result in the lowest cost of ownership in the industry.

This announcement coincides with the appointment of Michael Maciag to the position of Chief Operating Officer (COO) for Altiscale. (see link to official announcement here) Mr. Maciag will manage the company’s day-to-day operations including all customer-facing functions such as sales, marketing, and customer success.