Platfora, a startup dedicated to making Apache Hadoop easier to use, came out of stealth today and announced $5.68 million in series A funding. The company was founded by Ben Werther, who was head of product at Greenplum, the data warehousing solution EMC acquired last year.

Many companies are hoping to make business intelligence and big data more accessible to business users, so what’s Platfora’s secret sauce? The company has hired user experience design firm Cooper to design its interface. Unfortunately, no demo or screenshots are available yet.

Well known venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz lead the funding, and the company also received funding from In-Q-Tel, which Wikipedia describes as “a not-for-profit venture capital firm that invests in high-tech companies for the sole purpose of keeping the Central Intelligence Agency equipped with the latest in information technology in support of United States intelligence capability.” In-Q-Tel has also invested in Spotfire (now owned by TIBCO) and Palantir (a PayPal spin-off).

According to Platfora’s release: “While Platfora is primarily focused on commercial customers, U.S. intelligence agencies can benefit greatly from the power of Hadoop and IQT sees enormous need for the product that Platfora is building.”

Other companies trying to democratize Hadoop or Hadoop-like systems include Karmasphere, Radoop (which we’ve covered before) and BI vendors like Jaspersoft and Pentaho, which offer tools for creating reports from Hadoop’s HBase and other NoSQL datastores.

Services Angle

Without a product to evaluate or even a screenshot, it’s impossible to say whether Platfora will be successful in making big data accessible to non-data scientists. However, it’s reflective of a major trend. Big data is leading to big expectations. Companies want data mined more effectively, and customers are starting to wonder why companies aren’t using data mining to better serve them.

The upshot is that vendors are racing to build tools that will put big data into more hands. Hadoop is quickly becoming the standard platform for big data analytics (though it has competitors like HPCC Systems), so the next big thing in big data is accessibility.