Concurrent, proprietor of the open-source Cascading framework for developing big data workflows, has closed $ 4 million Series A investment round from True Ventures (see disclosure) and Rembrandt Partners. Cascading has been around for a few years, actually, but Concurrent only raised seed funding in 2011 and has been riding the wave of interest in making big data easier to do.
In practice, Cascading is generally used as a higher-level method than MapReduce for writing Hadoop jobs, although it’s technically a framework that could support any number of distributed-processing frameworks. It’s used by a number of notable users, including Etsy, Airbnb and Climate Corporation. In February, the Cascading project expanded its scope to address the growing SQL-on-Hadoop trend with a project called Lingual.
Software veteran Gary Nakamura is taking on the role of Concurrent CEO, replacing Cascading creator Chris Wenzel, who’ll stay on as the company’s CTO.
Disclosure: Concurrent is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.
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