The venture capital community is starting to take note of the growing demand for in-memory analytics. A group of international investors led by Russian financial services giant Sberbank this morning bought a $15 million stake in a vendor called GridGain Systems Inc. that they seem to perceive as their best chance at monetizing the trend.

It’s not hard to see why. While most of the other players in the scene have only been around for a few years, the California-based outfit can trace its roots back nearly a decade to the time when Hadoop was still an internal project at Yahoo Inc.’s analytics unit. GridGain has used its head start to build up an enviable customer base. Big names such as Apple Inc., Sony Corp. and Stanford University now rely on its In-Memory Data Fabric, which combines the best properties of several competing alternatives into a single package.

The list includes first and foremost Redis, a free key-value store commonly used as a cache for backend databases. It can keep the most frequently accessed records from an organization’s primary system in memory to reduce query latency and thereby speed response times. GridGain’s software is designed to fill the same purpose, but comes with a lot value-added functionality that extends its appeal to other use cases as well.

Chief among them is supporting large-scale analytics clusters. The company offers a premium extension that can enables the In-Memory Data Fabric to serve as a cache for the Hadoop File System or run MapReduce and Spark jobs by itself on a standalone basis. Such a configuration is able to process information several times faster than its vanilla counterpart, according to GridGain. It’s also more reliable thanks to an ACID-compliant architecture that is specifically designed to prevent accidental corruption of records.

The new funding will be used to expand the capabilities of the In-Memory Data Fabric even further. GridGain plans to step up its sales and marketing efforts as well in order to spread the word about its software, especially overseas.

Image via Geralt