AtScale Raises $7M in Funding

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., June 23 — AtScale, Inc, the first company to allow business users to do BI on Hadoop, announced today that it has raised a Series A round of $7M. Led by UMC Capital, this round also saw the participation of AME Ventures as well as Storm Ventures and XSeed Capital, who co-led the company’s seed round in 2013. To find out more about AtScale, go to http://www.atscale.com/try.

“We invest in companies that can drive massive industry shifts. AtScale is the technology that can connect the millions of analytics users to Hadoop in a natural and non-intrusive manner. We believe it can become the standard for how business people interact with Hadoop and it is well positioned to monetize the opportunity that sits between two massive markets: the new Big Data space and the established Analytics world,” says Jerry Yang, founding partner at AME Ventures and co-founder of Yahoo!

The glue between Hadoop and Business Intelligence (BI)

The Hadoop market is absolutely in need of a business interface. Enterprises have made significant investments to make Hadoop power their data infrastructure. And while, data platform leaders like Cloudera, HortonWorks and MapR have more than tripled revenue over the last two years, according to Gartner, no software vendor has enabled business users to tap into Hadoop’s scale and functionality using the analytical tools they already know and love like Microsoft Excel, Tableau and Qliktech.

AtScale is the glue between two fast-growing but currently disconnected markets: Big Data, estimated at $50B by Wikibon, and the Business Analytics industry, a space IDC predicts will reach $59.2B in 2018.

People, Timing and Technology

“It’s time to put the power of Hadoop in the hands of business users and remove the friction and limitations associated with existing approaches,” says Dave Mariani, CEO and founder of AtScale.

Mariani, a veteran of the Big Data era, practices what he preaches. The genesis for AtScale was a result of his Yahoo! experience where he was responsible for using data to drive revenue and engagement for the company’s advertising and web properties. Mariani and his team processed more than 30 billion events per day in Hadoop, making that data available to business users. Later, when at Klout, Mariani’s team managed a large-scale Hadoop cluster that powered a one trillion-row data warehouse. By then, he had looked everywhere for a solution like AtScale and couldn’t find it.

“Microsoft says there is more than a billion Excel users. And, over the last four years, Tableau Software user count has grown by more than six times. Business users want access to data and business discovery for Hadoop is a must. The industry hasn’t had a good answer to it, until now,” concludes Mariani.

The AtScale Difference

When asked about differentiation, Mariani answers that his company will win because it is the result of groundbreaking technology, perfect timing and strong collaboration with industry players.

“AtScale couldn’t have been invented before the introduction of SQL-on-Hadoop engines like Impala, SparkSQL and Hive/Tez. These engines are key ingredients and provided the foundation that allowed us to build a true business interface for Hadoop.”

Mariani’s team has worked closely with Hadoop innovators since the technology’s inception. In fact, Amr Awadallah, Founder and CTO at Cloudera invested in this round, and Michael Franklin, the Director of the Berkeley AMPLab, the group that spun out Databricks and created Apache Spark, is a company advisor.

“AtScale fits right between the latest Apache Hadoop ecosystem innovations and the industry’s most common BI tools. Its non-intrusive approach makes it a perfect fit for organizations looking to accelerate their path to interactive analytical insights on top of Hadoop,” says Amr Awadallah.

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Source: AtScale