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December 10, 2014

Qubole Secures $13M in Financing to Expand Big Data-as-a-Service Platform

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Dec. 10 — Qubole, a leading provider of Big Data in the cloud, announced today it has secured $13 million in series B financing led by Norwest Venture Partners, bringing the total investment in Qubole to date to $20 million. The funding builds on recent milestones from the company, including a partnership with Microsoft Azure to integrate Qubole Data Service (QDS) to Azure customers, and will be used to expand Qubole’s mission to help every company use the cloud to turn data into business growth.

“We know the real power of big data is getting it to the right people at the right time. Our mission is to help every company and every person at that company leverage big data to make a meaningful business impact,” said Ashish Thusoo, CEO and co-founder of Qubole. “We’ve seen tremendous adoption for our self-service platform and expect this to accelerate as our customers experience the incredible business outcomes that occur when everyone can access, process and collaborate with cloud data.”

Through its next generation self-service platform, Qubole empowers both developers and non-developers to access big data generated by their companies to gain actionable insights at a cost-effective rate. For example, Pinterest started with a small team of 30 Qubole users and has grown to more than 250 in the past year, and many of them aren’t engineers.

“Qubole is changing the big data conversation by tapping the power of the public cloud to provide a simple, cost-effective solution that turns the complicated task of analyzing data into a seamless everyday business process,” said Rama Sekhar of Norwest Venture Partners. “The Qubole team includes some of the most innovative entrepreneurs in the industry who are committed to meeting the evolving data needs of the enterprise.”

Qubole’s flagship product, QDS, runs Hadoop infrastructure where users can easily analyze and collaborate with their company’s data. QDS provides IT organizations the option to use cloud infrastructure — Google Compute, Amazon Web Services or Azure — to provide users with self-service access to data while eliminating the capital expenditures associated with maintaining hardware and hiring skilled support to manage that infrastructure.

While on-premises offerings from competitors require users to hire Hadoop infrastructure experts, purchase hardware and deploy Hadoop clusters in order to start analysis, Qubole provides a turnkey solution in the cloud that automatically provisions clusters and scales them according to usage and use case. Qubole provides significant cost savings, solves the “skill shortage” dilemma and reduces the risk of deploying big data.

Qubole’s platform currently processes 83 petabytes of data every month; that’s up from 57 petabytes of data it processed in September. In addition, customers conducted more than 4.96 million compute hours of data analysis in November on the Qubole Data Service.

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