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November 4, 2013

RapidMiner Secures $5M to Spelunk U.S. Market

Isaac Lopez

Formerly known as Rapid-I, a German analytics startup rebranded as RapidMiner has secured $5 million in Series A investment, and is set on expanding its presence in the North American market.

The company, which claims 35,000 production deployments and 200,000 active users of its predictive analytics software, took in the funding round amid a massive rebranding effort in which it launched a new website and rebranded its product line. The funding round was led by Earlybird Venture Capital and Open Ocean Capital.

While it’s easy to dismiss this as yet another funding announcement for yet another predictive analytics firm, it’s worth noting the involvement of Open Ocean Capital, the venture firm that rose from the success of the MySQL database, including Michael “Monty” Widenius, a co-founder of both MySQL and Open Ocean Capital, which aims to identify and invest in companies with disruptive product offerings.

“With three million product downloads, RapidMiner has rapidly become one of the leaders in the predictive analytics space,” said Widenius in a statement. “We plan to leverage our experience in building MySQL, and the MySQL community, to help the RapidMiner team advance its technology and grow its user community around the world.”

RapidMiner offers a “plug and play” predictive analytics suite that aims to eliminate complex programming processes, integrating seamlessly with Hadoop, Excel, Access, Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL, Sybase, and other data sources. While the software aims to eliminate complexity, it also offers tools for those who would like to do more sophisticated analysis, such as with R. 

The company hopes to further capitalize on the success that it has built in Europe by attacking the North American market, where analysts say big data growth is outpacing the rest of the world.

Source: IDC Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker, October 2013

“The breakout success of analytics platforms such as Tableau Software and Splunk underscores the massive demand for solutions that give businesses more control over the analytics process, and detailed insight into their operations,” said Usama Fayyad, RapidMiner board member and former Chief Data Officer at Yahoo! and Head of Data Mining at Microsoft. “Unlike traditional, older predictive analytics solutions, RapidMiner allows users without any programming expertise to quickly analyze enterprise data and build predictive models that keep pace with the requirements of Big Data.”

Already, the company has a healthy start as it plans for its growth strategy. The company claims that it already has more than 400 paying customers, including EADS, GfK, Lufthansa, PayPal, Pepsi, Sanofi, Siemens, Telenor, and Volkswagen.

Related items:

IDC Report: Cloudera Leading Hadoop Distro Choices 

The Big Data Market By the Numbers 

Teradata CEO Downplays Big Data in Revenue Slowdown 

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