Jack Clark, The Register
June 2, 2014
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/02/cascading_data_analysis_funding
Hadoop startup Concurrent has slurped $10m in Series B filthy valley lucre as a new sense of enthusiasm breathes life into the “big data” community.
Concurrent announced its round on Monday. The company stewards Cascading, a free bit of software that helps devs do application development on top of Hadoop.
The company ran into trouble earlier last year when it took in $4m in Series A funding from True Ventures and Rembrand Venture Partners to fund the development of Cascading.
“In crisis there is opportunity,” chief technology officer Chris Wensel told us via email at the time. “By not having the capital and talent to boost our vision, we risk losing all we have done and will never reach the places we can see.”
Over a year later, things have improved dramatically at the company. “We’ve stabilized and built out the platform and made it very valuable,” Wensel told us by phone. Besides developing Cascading, the company has also pushed on with some associated projects such as “Pattern”, which makes it trivial to export machine-learning models from typical tech like MicroStrategies and onto Hadoop.
Concurrent is now seeing around “150,000 downloads a month” of its flagship Cascading software as of “a couple of months ago,” according to chief executive Gary Nakamura. It has also recently partnered with companies including Hortonworks, Rackspace, and Databricks.
This adoption and enthusiasm has compelled it to take in some more money to fund the development, sales, and marketing of its commercial application performance management product “Driven”. There will also be more investment into integrating various open source Hadoop-related projects to work with Concurrent’s tech, including things such as Spark, Storm, and Apache Tez, Nakamura said. Bain Capital Ventures led the $10m round, along with the existing investors True Ventures and Rembrandt Ventures.
In many ways the turnaround at the company is a reflection of trends in the broader Hadoop community, which spent much of last year dealing with the fallout of hyped tech claims and false promises. This year, by contrast, some businesses seem to be finally squeezing some real value out of the tech, bringing a new round of enthusiasm (and cash) into the startups involved with the tech.
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