Concurrent Cascades Into Funding Round

Concurrent, a startup company based in San Francisco, has caught on in the big data space with their open source product Cascading. Investors have started to notice, as Concurrent has raised $4 million after a Series A round of funding.

“After our initial investment, we have watched Concurrent grow substantially and lead the Big Data application development market,” said Puneet Agarwal, Partner at True Ventures, one of the firms whose contributions were significant. “The promise of its core technology, combined with the management team’s pedigree and Cascading’s success, continue to make this an exciting investment opportunity,” Agarwal continued.

That promise lies with the aforementioned Cascading, a popular Hadoop app-building framework reportedly used by the likes of Twitter, Etsy, and eBay. According to Concurrent, Cascading works as a Java-based application programming interface (API) that lies underneath an institution’s data storage within Hadoop. The framework can hypothetically work in three dimensions: as a processing API, a scheduling API, and an integration API.

The principle behind Cascading is to help meet the many challenges associated with building apps atop Hadoop. For example, scheduling is an important consideration as many applications would have to query through MapReduce; an improper scheduling would lead to a sub-optimal runtime. Based on their investment figure and the somewhat impressive list of big data users, the 2008 startup seems to be gaining traction.

In the same announcement, Cascadia noted that Gary Nakamura, who had previously been SVP and general manager of Terracotta before its 2011 buyout, was appointed as the startup’s CEO.

“Our investors’ confidence in Concurrent validates our strategy and the pioneering work we have done since the launch of Cascading in 2008,” said new Concurrent CEO Gary Nakamura on the encouraging funding figure.

Indeed, the ability to build apps into Hadoop is important in the platform’s growth as a big data management and processing system. As such, it is no surprise that a popular open source app-building framework such as Cascading has attracted investor attention. It is now up to Concurrent to grow and improve the Hadoop application building environment.

“This new investment will enable us to build on this foundation and accelerate our growth as we work to deliver our commercial product and grow the core team,” Nakamura said.

Related Articles

A Bet Against Hadoop That Hopes to Deliver Big Gains

How Ford is Putting Hadoop Pedal to the Metal

Five Interesting Startups at Strata