UPDATED 08:00 EDT / JANUARY 23 2018

BIG DATA

Unravel Data banks $15M to improve big data application management

Unravel Data Systems Inc., which manages application performance in big data environments, has raised $15 million in a financing led by GGV Capital.

The Series B round, joined by Microsoft Ventures Inc. and Menlo Ventures, brings the total raised to $23 million. The company, which emerged from stealth in the fall of 2016, plans to spend the money on sales, marketing, product development and expanding staff in its Bangalore, India offices.

Unravel Data provides analysis and resolution specifically for big data elements such as Hadoop, Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, Apache Hive and Apache Impala. In doing so, it unifies a process that currently requires an assortment of different monitoring and administration tools, such as application logs, Cloudera Inc.’s Manager, MapR Technologies Inc.’s Control System and the Apache Sparkcontext. Its performance management platform tracks, correlates and interprets performance data across the full-stack for optimization, troubleshooting and analysis from a single dashboard.

“Application performance management is very hard when you’re running big data applications,” said Chief Executive Kunal Agarwal. “Companies get slowed down dealing with service-level issues that their teams don’t have the skills to figure out. Challenges are often clusterwide, and it’s hard to figure out who’s doing what. We figured out that our solution fit with the market. Now it’s time to start scaling.”

Thanks in part to the threefold growth in its customer base in 2017, the company’s funding round was oversubscribed and “investor interest was so strong we were able to close the series in just two weeks,” Agarwal said. The investment by Microsoft Corp.’s venture arm is notable, given that the financier had not previously invested in a performance management company.

“Microsoft is pushing a lot of services like cloud and big data to their customers, which is an opportunity for both of us,” Agarwal said, citing Microsoft’s HDInsight cloud-based big data service and its focus on machine learning via the Azure cloud. “We’re investigating closer integration with Azure cloud.” However, Unravel Data plans to remain cloud-agnostic, he added.

Since announcing a major update to the platform nearly a year ago, Unravel Data has been broadening support for different big data components. The company recently started supporting streaming data ingestion via Apache Kafka pipelines and is working on support for Presto and Apache Drill.

It also plans to support NoSQL platforms, beginning with Apache HBase and Cassandra. “We can now cover 90 percent of a customer’s overall big data environment,” Agarwal said.

Image: Flickr CC

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