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April 30, 2015

Big Data Start-Up Rocana Raises $15M

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., April 30 — Rocana Inc., provider of root cause analysis software, today announced a new $15 million round of Series B investment led by Google Ventures with participation from General Catalyst, who led the previous round, as well as Toba Capital and Paul Sagan, bringing its total funding to $19.4 million. Now rebranded as Rocana – an abbreviation of root cause analysis – the company’s mission is to help IT operators monitor and support new shared services infrastructures in data centers to keep them up and running.

“The teams at Google Ventures and Toba Capital have experienced first-hand how the evolution of data center infrastructure creates new demands on IT operations,” said Omer Trajman, CEO of Rocana. “Industry veterans Rich Miner, Vinny Smith and Paul Sagan also see how data center infrastructure is changing and creating the need for Rocana’s software. Our new investors, who are throwing their weight and experience behind Rocana, give our customers confidence in our leadership in solving these problems.”

As companies deploy shared services infrastructures like OpenStack, Hadoop and Docker, IT operators are suffering from increasingly complex environments. Legacy tools don’t deliver the power that operators need, since older tools are designed for monitoring simpler discrete application silos with predictable, small data volumes. Rocana is developing domain-specific machine learning, analytics and purpose-built visualizations that quickly guide operators to the root causes of complex issues that span across modern data centers and clouds.

“We are impressed with the strong backgrounds of Rocana’s founders, combined with their vision to reduce big data complexity across large enterprises,” said Rich Miner, General Partner at Google Ventures. “Rocana’s approach uniquely leverages the Hadoop ecosystem to reduce IT infrastructure complexity. We’re excited to work with them as they scale operations.”

“The Rocana team is exceptionally qualified to bring the next generation of innovative IT operations and monitoring solutions to the market,” said Vinny Smith, Founder of Toba Capital and former Chairman of Quest Software. “Rocana’s software operates across the full stack of machine event data, from conventional, physical infrastructure to modern software-defined distributed systems. These advancements keep IT operations ahead of the technology curve, enabling them to deliver against mission-critical SLAs and support business applications and data centers well into the future.”

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