MapR Gets Big Money for Big Data
If there was any doubt that the Big Data market is a platform for big money, those doubts should now disappear. Open-source Big Data startup MapR Technologies today announced a $110 million round of financing, including $80 million of equity financing and $30 million in debt financing.
MapR previously scored $30 million of financing in March of 2013. Total financing to date for the company now stands at $174 million.
Google Capital led the latest financing round.
“MapR helps companies around the world deploy Hadoop rapidly and reliably, generating significant business results,” said Gene Frantz, general partner at Google Capital, in a statement. “We led this round of funding because we believe MapR has a great solution for enterprise customers, and they’ve built a strong and growing business.”
From a technology perspective, MapR delivers a Big Data solution built around the open-source Hadoop ecosystem. With the new funding MapR has pledged that it will further its support of a number of open-source efforts, including Hadoop as well as the Apache Drill and Apache Spark projects.
Making Big Data Faster
Apache Drill is currently an incubated project at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and provides Big Data administrators with the ability to make adhoc queries against data sources. The Apache Drill project coincidentally is inspired by a Google effort known as Dremel. The promise of Apache Drill is the ability to query petabytes of data across up to 10,000 servers and get a response in seconds.
Apache Spark is also an interesting large-scale data processing engine that aims to be faster than the Hadoop MapReduce engine from which MapR derives its name.
While the new funding for MapR is non-trivial, it is still only a fraction of what Big Data vendor Cloudera announced earlier this year. In March, Cloudera announced it had raised a staggering $900 million in venture financing. Google Capital is also an investor in Cloudera.
Hadoop vendor Hortonworks has raised money this year as well, with a $100 million round that was also announcedin March.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Apps Today and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
