Zoomdata Raises $17M

Venture capitalists remain bullish on data analytics startups.

Stream processing engine specialist Zoomdata Inc. said Oct. 6 it has raised $17 million in a Series B funding round led by Accel Partners.

Zoomdata, Reston, Va., said it would use the funds to accelerate product development while expanding marketing and sales efforts.

The startup has come up with a way to use a stream processing engine to analyze historical as well as real-time data. It combines open source stream processing engines like Apache with data connection and visualization libraries.

“With the rapid adoption of modern Hadoop, NoSQL and Spark datastores, we saw an opportunity to disrupt the legacy market for enterprise and embedded reporting, dashboarding, and analytics” with a visualization platform targeting business users, Zoomdata CEO and founder Justin Langseth said in a statement.

Zoomdata claims its patented micro-query technology combined with its stream processing engine help render big data visually. The platform also taps both historical and real-time data stored in legacy and current databases.

“Instead of launching big queries and waiting for results, we run streams of little tiny queries against historical data and process the results of those micro queries, as we call them, also through the stream processing engine,” Langseth explained in a YouTube presentation. “That allows us to very quickly visualize very large sets of data, and do it almost instantaneously.”

Accel Partners said it is betting on Zoomdata’s ability to speed access and analysis of data, especially historical data. “They have taken a fresh approach to the traditional query-response model that gives users access to their legacy data assets and their new big data investments,” according to Jake Flomenberg, general partner at Accel Partners.

NEA, Columbus NOVA Techology Partners, Razor’s Edge Ventures and B7 joined Accel Partners in the latest funding round.

Zoomdata said it began shipping      its data visualization product in February 2013 and claims more than 20 enterprise customers that include a “global pharmaceutical company.”

Another customer described as a large accounting firm uses Zoomdata’s platform to provide customers with real-time access to a database of retail pricing trends in a MongoDB datastore. The company said its “data sharpening” technology provides an approximated sketch of search queries in real time.

The visualization is then updated continuously through stream processing of micro-query results until data comes into focus. The stream processing engine analyzes real-time as well as historical data.

Using HTML5 and a touch-first interface, users can sift through billions of records on a smartphone or tablet as well as via web browsers, the company claimed.

Zoomdata has so far raised $22 million and plans to expand beyond its current 50 employees. The additional venture funding also will be used to expand the data startup’s expansion into the business user market.

In August, Zoomdata joined seven other data analytics companies in a partner program with data unification specialist Tamr Inc. focusing on aggregating disparate data sources.

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