Israeli Startup Looks to Ease Hadoop Rollouts

An Israeli big data processing startup said this week it has secured $3 million in early-round funding and will launch its Hadoop-based platform in the U.S.

Tel Aviv-based Xplenty announced Oct. 20 the Series A funding from Waarde Capital and existing seed investor Magma Venture Partners. The funding will be used to expand platform features on its cloud-based processing engine while the company expands globally. Xplenty also announced plans to offer its big data processing technology directly to U.S. customers.

The company said its big data processing platform is built natively on Hadoop. The platform is said to achieve necessary big data scaling by eliminating the need for a dedicated server to host processing. Those platforms that do rely on a dedicated server miss “the whole point of big data scalability,” the startup claimed.

Xplenty also promotes its approach as leveraging multiple environments via its ability to utilize Hadoop clusters on public and private environments as well as standalone clusters. The choice of environment depends on processing requirements.

The processing platform also is being pitched as taking the complexity out of Hadoop by eliminating the need for previous Hadoop expertise or writing background code. The platform is intended to solve “the problem of data integration, processing, and preparation for analysis on Hadoop,” Xplenty CEO and Co-Founder Yaniv Mor, said in a statement.

While the global Hadoop market continues to expand at a rate that could exceed 50 percent over the next six years, Xplenty believes it has found a market niche in making it easier to use Hadoop as a shortage of data scientists worsens. That shortage is forecast to peak in 2018, “making it especially challenging to build expert data teams to manage Hadoop initiatives in-house,” Xplenty claimed in a statement announcing the venture funding.

Hence, it is promoting a “coding-free environment” as a way for enterprises to get up and running quickly on Hadoop. Its processing engine is said to run on top of Amazon Web Services, IBM Softlayer and Rackspace. It can also be connected to on-premise infrastructure, the Israeli startup added.

Xplenty’s approach “corresponds directly to a clear and growing organizational need,” Sasha Babitsky, head of Waarde Capital’s Israeli office, asserted in a statement.

In eliminating the need to write code for a Hadoop rollout, the startup’s approach is to offer fast connectivity to a range of data stores along with a set of “out-of-the-box data transformation components,” it stressed.

Xplenty was co-founded in June 2012 by Yaniv Mor, a data architecture specialist, and Saggi Neumann, who also serves as chief technology officer. Mor previously co-founded Strax Data, which offers a Hadoop development platform.

Xplenty also maintains an office in San Francisco.

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