UPDATED 12:32 EDT / SEPTEMBER 08 2011

Andreessen Horowitz Invests in New Hadoop Startup

Platfora, one of the latest Hadoop distributors, announced it has closed a $5.7 million  series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. In-Q-Tel, “the independent strategic investment firm that identifies innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the U.S. intelligence community,” also participated in the financing round.

Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Scott Weiss will be joining the company’s board.

Platfora, which was founded by Ben Werther, former product head of Greenplum, is kicking things off on the right foot.  Andreessen Horowitz is a pretty high profile VC firm, and considering that it invested in players such as Box, expectations around the startup will likely be going up.

Here’s what Werther said in a released statement:

“Businesses are increasingly looking to Hadoop, rather than traditional databases, to store their fast-growing datasets. We transform Hadoop from promising back-end technology into an effortless, interactive and beautiful way for business users to get rapid insight and answers from any sized dataset, even those with petabytes of information.”

Platfora aims to simplify Hadoop using the platform it built on the open-source software, which evidently targets both private and public sectors customers with big data backloads.

The news of Platfora’s funding follows a similar update from MapR, another startup that competes with its Hadoop distros. The company announced late last month that it has secured $20 million from  Redpoint Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates. MapR also has a promising outlook, thanks to the fact it runs faster than some of its competitors, and that it has built a solid partner ecosystem that includes EMC and others.  The latter’s Enterprise Edition Hadoop  is built almost entirely on M5, the paid version of MapR’s offering.


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU