Big Data Startup BIME Raises $4M
BIME Analytics, a French company that offers a stack of business intelligence services (BI) and tools in the cloud, has secured a Series A round of funding worth $4 million, led by Alven Capital Partners in Paris. This round follows the company’s expansion and opening of its U.S. headquarters in Kansas City, Mo.
“The rise of Big Data is a reality, and businesses of any size are using cloud-based tools like BIME to become truly data-driven,” said Rachel Delacour, CEO and co-founder. “BIME now has the capital and talent to keep innovating and expand globally, particularly in the dynamic U.S. market.”
Founded in 2009, BIME offers data analysis, visualization and dashboarding as a service in four languages, including Chinese. BIME plans to use the capital to invest in continued enhancements in its BI software and to expand sales in North America.
In October BIME opened its first office outside of France in Kansas City, which has been ranked by The Kauffman Foundation as third among large metro areas for start-up activity in the past decade. BIME will start with an initial team of seven employees, focusing on sales and support, and plans to further increase headcount in 2014. The company will also add staff at its French headquarters in Montpellier, doubling the overall company size by the end of 2013.
BIME was the first vendor to offer a business intelligence front-end for Google BigQuery.
As Delacour told Enterprise Apps Today in June, Google BigQuery is a more accessible option for analyzing Big Data than Hadoop. “BigQuery is Big Data for the rest of us,” she said. “It’s easy to use and easy to manage. It’s cost effective since you pay as you go, and virtually limitless in terms of scalability. We are proud to be the first vendor to offer a BI front-end for this exciting service.”
The current version of its software, BIME v5, includes an HTML5 framework and an in-memory calculation engine. BIME v5 employs a compression scheme allowing more data to fit in-memory while saving compute time. It also offers smart automatic caching to serve assets and minimize database calls and processing — from its small Déjà Vu cache all the way up to the capabilities of Google BigQuery to serve up billions of rows.
According to BIME, its Grand Prix calculation engine scales automatically so new servers may launch, join or leave the cluster as needed. BIME offers connectors to a wide range of data sources, from spreadsheets on a laptop and large relational databases to datasets in the cloud such as Dropbox, Google Analytics, Vectorwise, Amazon Redshift, SAP HANA and Salesforce.com.
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