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June 25, 2013

Hortonworks Levels Up With $50 Million Haul

Isaac Lopez

Hortonworks CEO, Rob Bearden announced today that the company has secured a new round of funding to the tune of $50 million dollars, giving the upstart Hadoop distro company a new level of legitimacy in the enterprise Hadoop wars.

The funding round is being led by new investors, including Tenaya Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group, and includes participation from Hortonworks existing investors including Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, and Yahoo!.  This investment follows a similar one that happened during Hadoop Summit 2011, where it was rumored they had picked up $20 million. At the time, the company was rumored to be valued at $200 million.

The announcement squashes any speculation that Hortonworks is primed as an acquisition target, giving the Hadoop player enough fuel to pursue its plans for growth. These plans include making Hadoop a more robust platform with increased funding for such projects as Apache Stinger and YARN, as well as scaling their organization in field and engineering operations.

“This funding…will enable us to increase the rate of innovation across all of the Hadoop projects,” wrote Bearden. “This starts the YARN based initiatives but also extends to Security, Data Lifecycle Management, Streaming and beyond. Those investments will continue to fulfill enterprise requirements and fuel great enterprise adoption in the coming months.”

The announcement comes on the eve of the Hortonworks hosted Hadoop Summit, starting Wednesday, June 26th, which the company says will be attended by 2500+ Hadoop enthusiasts, and more than 65 sponsors including, Yahoo!, Cisco, Datameer, IBM, Microsoft, SAS, and others. 

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