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December 19, 2013

Datameer Reels in $19M as Venture Funds Move Up the Hadoop Stack

Isaac Lopez

The year 2013 has been a very fruitful one for the purveyors of non-relational database technologies. This week Hadoop analytics vendor Datameer announced venture capital funding of $19 million, a signal that technologies that lay on top of the Hadoop stack are ready for their time in the funding spotlight.

Despite its raw potential, Hadoop is hard. Often, when a business manager first learns about the framework, his head is sent spinning as he marvels at how quickly the industry seems to be changing, and wondering if he can keep up. One company, Datameer, is trying to take some of the mystery out of Hadoop.

Datameer has been doing very well since it launched its data analytics platform in 2010. The company rides atop Hadoop by offering a platform that merges Excel spreadsheets with the elephant, providing a relatively easy onramp for executives looking to leverage Hadoop’s potential.

“It’s Excel on steroids,” characterized Datameer product manager Karen Hsu, explaining the platform’s concept. “It has integration – pre-built connectors that automate the process of bringing in all this different type of data. We pull it into an environment that doesn’t require a data model.” This, she says, is key because now anyone in the organization can build her own spreadsheets that leverage and make sense of the data.

Currently, Hsu says that most of the Datameer use cases are in marketing and sales, but notes that marketing is just the tip of the iceberg for the platform’s functionality. “One of our customers net $2 billion using it for fraud detection,” she told us.

The approach has been a sound one for the company, enabling ground-level business analysts who don’t have coding backgrounds to leverage Hadoop, even without running a cluster (Datameer can install a single-node Hadoop implementation on a PC or laptop). The results are a bridge to Hadoop using tools that business analysts are already familiar with using. “The spreadsheet interface is used by over 80 million different people – it’s the most commonly used tool on the market for data analysis,” says Hsu.

Validating its approach, Datameer has raised an additional $19 million in a Series D round of funding, bringing its total raised since launch to $36.75 million. The recent round was led by Next World Capital, and included Workday, Citi Ventures, and Software AG.

Datameer says its platform is catching fire, with the company nearly tripling in size over the last year, counting more than 130 leading brands from “every major vertical,” including British Telecommunications, Cardinal Health, CDW, Sears, and Visa.

“It took 10 years to get to where we are today with Hadoop, but it’s not surprising that now companies are wanting the pre-built and proven analytic applications that sits directly on Hadoop,” said Datameer CEO Stefan Groschupf in a statement. “It abstracts the complexity of the framework. This funding is going to let us grow quickly to meet insatiable global demand.” 

With 2014 set to dawn, we expect to see more activity from these upstream apps that leverage the Hadoop stack, especially as YARN begins to take traction.

Related items:

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Intel Goes Graph with Hadoop Distro 

Hadoop Version 2: One Step Closer to the Big Data Goal  

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