Karmasphere, a startup focused on helping analysts write better big data applications, raised $ 6 million in a Series B round from Presidio Ventures, Hummer Winblad and US Venture Partners. That brings the Cupertino, Calif.-based company’s total funding to $ 11 million, and the announced VC investment in Hadoop to more than $ 30 million in the last 30 days.
As the old saying goes, you’d have to have been living in a cave for the past year to have not heard about Hadoop, the open-source data-processing engine. Once a darling among large web sites such as Yahoo and Facebook, Hadoop has spread like wildfire into web companies of all sizes and, thanks in part to Cloudera’s presence, into the banking, intelligence and other traditional industries. So promising is the technology that IBM, EMC and, now, Oracle are getting into fray as well.
Karmasphere’s Analyst product sits above the core Hadoop distribution platform layer where companies such as Cloudera, EMC and MapR play, instead helping companies write applications, or workflows, that run on Hadoop. As I explained last week in covering the latest version of Karmasphere Analyst:
Karmasphere is trying to woo data analysts who are well versed in working within data warehouses but still need some guidance to translate that knowledge into a Hadoop environment. To that end, the company has devised a workflow for accessing, assembling, analyzing and acting upon big data.
Every VC I’ve spoken with in the past several months has touted big data as an area of particular interest, so I have to assume the Hadoop-funding train is just getting started. Hadoop is just a portion of the greater big data puzzle, but happens to be the focal point right now and a great core around which to launch a company and get some cash.
Feature image courtesy of Flickr user zzzack.
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