Big Data, Big Financing: Hortonworks Nabs $50 Million In VC Funding

New investors Tenaya Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group led the round with participation from existing investors Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Yahoo. CEO Rob Beardon disclosed the new financing in a blog post late Tuesday.

Hortonworks, founded in 2011, raised $70 million in venture capital in earlier rounds of financing, bringing the company's total financing to $120 million.

[Related: 13 Big Data Products To Check Out At Hadoop Summit 2013 ]

Hortonworks markets the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), its own distribution of the Apache Software Foundation's open-source Hadoop big data software, along with support, training and other services. It competes with Hadoop distributions from Cloudera, MapR Technologies and other vendors.

"With this funding we will focus on both scaling global field operations as well as further investing in our engineering organization," Beardon said. "It will enable us to increase the rate of innovation across all of the Hadoop projects."

This week at the Hadoop Summit in San Jose, Calif., Hortonworks will unveil a community preview of the next release of HDP with support for YARN, a next-generation Hadoop data-processing framework for running distributed applications.

"The innovation in YARN will further cement Hadoop as a core component of the data architectures of corporate IT organizations as it unlocks the power of Hadoop to an even broader range of new analytic, transactional and operational use cases," Beardon said in his blog.

PUBLISHED JUNE 26, 2013