Karmasphere, a company that offers an analytics engine that sits on top of the Hadoop data processing infrastructure, announced today that it has closed a second round of funding for $6 million.  New investor Presidio Ventures, and existing backers Hummer Winblad and US Venture Partners participated in the round, which brings the total venture capital invested in the firm to an impressive $11 million.  Karmasphere was founded only last year.

“Shun Aramaki, who led the investment in Karmasphere, brings with him a wealth of Big Data market expertise,” said Gail Ennis, CEO, Karmasphere. “Shun and his colleagues at Presidio Ventures will be a great asset to our team.”

Karmasphere will invest the fresh capital in R&D, as well as the expansion of its sales and marketing efforts.

Earlier this month the company unveiled the new Karmasphere Data Analyst, its flagship offering that wraps a development and analytics environment around the core Hadoop engine, subsequently not competing with Cloudera and other distributors that word on that level.  The latest version of Data Analyst features an improved interface with visualization and point-and-click settings, among other things, all designed to streamline the data scientist’s job.

The latest release of Data Analyst was unveiled right after Karmasphere announced a partnership with Think Big Analytics, a Hadoop service provider. The two companies have two offering line-ups that can be jointly promoted to non-mutual customers and supplement each other, and Karmasphere will likely continue to develop additional strategic partnerships.

In light of the fresh round of funding, it’s interesting to recap on the direction Karmasphere decided to take. Shevek Mankin, the chief technology officer for the big data solutions, discussed some background in length during an interview at theCube: the initial idea was to make a security offering, but thanks to the fact they needed data to develop it, they transited to the Hadoop route.