Samsung Ventures backs Cloudant with undisclosed investment

Cloudant, the start up that puts its NoSQL database service on your choice of clouds, is getting an undisclosed investment from Samsung Ventures, the investment arm of the gigantic Korean electronics conglomerate.

Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle

The new funding comes after a similar undisclosed investment from In-Q-Tel, an investment company tied to the US intelligence sector, and before that about $ 4 million in capital from Avalon Ventures and Y Combinator.

Cloudant’s DBaaS is a managed service helps developers focus on their applications, not the underlying cloud infrastructure, which in Cloudant’s case can be Rackspace, Amazon Web Services, Joyent, Microsoft Azure and SoftLayer.

Samsung obviously sees that appeal. In a statement, Samsung Ventures America’s senior investment manager Hyuk-Jeen Suh, said his company:

“believes a globally distributed data layer and management of that data is especially critical for large enterprise businesses … We felt that this is the right time to strategically invest in Cloudant to support the company’s vision to manage the proliferation of data to be created by, for example, mobile devices, machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies, and the ‘Internet of things’ in the future.”

Cloudant’s appeal is that it can place its processing and aggregation power where it’s needed, CEO Derek Schoettle told me last year. The Boston-based company was founded by three MIT physicists. Schoettle, a former VP at Vertica Systems, came aboard as CEO two years ago.

Indeed as more people carry more mobile devices and as the use of sensors explodes, the amount of data that needs to be aggregated and processed will only keep growing. That creates a need for a widely distributed database (or database service) that can be placed close to that data. That’s a big opportunity for the companies that can capitalize on it.