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September 25, 2013

NGDATA Nets $3.3 Million, Adds Cutting to Advisory Board

Isaac Lopez

NGDATA announced this week that they’ve taken in a $3.3 million funding round for their Hadoop-based customer intelligence management offering. The company also announced some board member announcements, including the father of Hadoop, Doug Cutting.

The new funding round, a Series B investment, was led by Capricorn Venture Partners, a lesser-known European venture firm who primarily plays in Europe. This most recent investment comes a year after a $2.5 million Series A round.

NGDATA offers a customer intelligence platform which utilizes Hadoop and HBase to provide businesses with insights into their customers, products, markets and operations. Using continuous indexing, the company says that they are able to provide businesses with real time, rapidly accessible customer data that can be used for such things as personalized, contextual coupons, location-specific customer offers, and behavior specific programs aimed at driving sales and increasing customer loyalty.

The Lily product demo from NGDATA from NGDATA on Vimeo.

According to Capricorn, NGDATA has gained significant traction over the last year in such industries as financial services, telecom, and media/publishing, and grew its customer base, particularly among European companies including De Persgroep, France Telecom, KBC, Orange and Telenet.

Earlier this year, the company closed on the acquisition of ENQIO, a Belgian-based data science consultancy group. The Acqui-hire staffed NGDATA with a team of data scientists, helping the company to push out new upgrades to their core software, including the Lily 2.4 release, which added a new provisioning framework (which allows installation to EC2), Hive integration, and a faceted search capability.

The new funding round is expected to be used to further develop the Lily platform, as well as try to capitalize on the momentum the company says it has built in the last year through customer acquisition and partnership.

One of their key partners is Hadoop distro vendor, Cloudera, where NGDATA says they have played a key role in Cloudera’s Search by decoupling the trigger and indexing component of their Lily platform and offering it as a stand-alone, open source project that is underlays the Hadoop vendor’s search framework.

These efforts appear to have culminated in an even closer working relationship between the two companies – as part of the funding announcement, NGDATA has announced new board members, including founding member of Hadoop, Doug Cutting, who also serves as the Chief Architect at Cloudera, as well as a director with the Apache Software Foundation.

For anyone interested in exploring NGDATA’s Lily platform, the company offers an open source version of the Lily Data Repository for download.

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