Follow The Money: 21 Big Data Startups That Have Scored Big In Venture Funding This Year

Big Data, Big Money

The market for information technology for capturing, storing and managing big data is growing nearly 32 percent per year and could reach $24 billion by 2016, predicts IDC. And that's not even including business analytics software -- a market that IDC has projected will alone reach $51 billion by 2016.

So it's no surprise that there's a lot of venture capital flowing to the wave of startups that have emerged in recent years with innovative big data technologies. In recent months, the rush to provide funding for big data companies seems to have accelerated. Here's 21 companies that have been on the receiving end of venture capitalist and angel investor largesse since the start of the year.

Actifio Raises $50 Million

CEO: Ash Ashutosh

Data protection appliance vendor Actifio (http://www.actifio.com) received a new round of funding worth $50 million in March in series D funding and is expected to launch an initial public offering (IPO) in the next couple of years. Technology Crossover Ventures led the round, joined by Advanced Technology Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.

Actifio, Waltham, Mass., develops purpose-built, data-protection appliances that manage backup, snapshot, business continuity, disaster recovery, test and development, analytics and other processes that create copies of production data. About 85 percent of the company's sales are made through channel partners.

Ayasdi Collects $10 Million

CEO: Gurjeet Singh

Ayasdi (http://www.ayasdi.com) raised $10 million in Series A financing in January, with Khosla Ventures and Floodgate leading the way. The Palo, Alto, Calif.-based company has now raised $13.25 million.

Ayasdi has developed what it calls "topological data analysis" software based on research at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the National Science Foundation and Stanford University. The tools provide a way to analyze and visualize large volumes of complex data, such as that generated in the life sciences, oil and gas exploration, and financial services industries.

Causata Brings In $7.5 Million

CEO: Paul Wahl

Causata (http://www.causata.com) raised $7.5 million in Series C round funding from Accel Partners, bringing its total funding to $23 million.

Causata develops "customer experience management" applications that combine huge volumes of online and offline data about consumers from many sources -- website activity, email addresses, cookies -- and combine it all to create customer profiles for B2C marketers. The company also has developed machine learning algorithms that continuously build predictive models about consumer behavior.

Concurrent Reaps $4 Million

CEO: Gary Nakamura

Concurrent (http://www.concurrentinc.com) raised $4 million in Series A venture capital in March. Investors included True Ventures and Rembrandt Partners. The company raised a $900,000 seed investment in August 2011.

San Francisco-based Concurrent developed the open-source Cascading framework that simplifies the development, deployment and management of big data applications on Apache Hadoop. Founder Chris Wensel recently took on the company's CTO role and software industry veteran Gary Nakamura was appointed CEO.

Continuum Analytics Gathers $3 Million

CEO: Travis Oliphant

Continuum Analytics (http://continuum.io), an Austin, Texas-based developer of Python-based data analytics and applications, raised $3 million in February from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's XDATA initiative.

Continuum Analytics offers the Anaconda collection of Python libraries for developers building large-scale data analysis, predictive analytics and visualization applications.

Data Gravity Pulls In $30 Million

CEO: Paula Long

Data Gravity (http://datagravity.com) raised $30 million in venture capital in January in its second round of funding. The new investment round, led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, brings total investment in the company to $42 million.

The Nashua, N.H.-based startup is developing technology to transform stored data into information without the need for complex software packages. The company expects to launch its first product in 2014. Data Gravity CEO and co-founder Paula Long was a co-founder of EqualLogic, which in 2008 was acquired by Dell.

Deep Information Sciences Nabs $10 Million

CEO: Kurt Dobbins

Deep Information Sciences (http://deep.is/information-science) raised $10 million in Series A funding in April from Stage 1 Ventures, as well as Robert Davoli and other angel investors.

Portsmouth, N.H.-based Deep developed DeepDB, a new general-purpose database the company described as being engineered specifically for big data and cloud computing. The technology is capable of handling realtime transactions and analytics in the same data set -- a task that traditional relational database systems find difficult to do.

Elasticsearch Takes In $24 Million

CEO: Steven Schuurman

Elasticsearch (http://www.elasticsearch.com) raised $24 million in Series B funding in February, led by Mike Volpi of Index Ventures with Benchmark Capital and SV Angel also participating.

Elasticsearch, based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, developed an open-source, distributed search engine based on Apache Lucene that's capable of searching and analyzing terabytes of data. At the same time it announced the new funding, the company said it had surpassed the two-million downloads milestone.

Gainsight Gets New Name, A New President And $9 Million In Funding

CEO: Nick Mehta

Gainsight, (http://www.gainsight.com), a developer of predictive analytics software for big data, raised $9 million in Series A funding in April from investors led by Battery Ventures.

The company also said that Nick Mehta, previously CEO at Software-as-a-Service company LiveOffice, is Gainsight's new CEO. Founder Jim Eberlin is now president and will focus on product strategy and sales development.

The Gainsight name is a change from the company's original name, JBara Software. Mountain View, Calif.-based Gainsight develops predictive analytics software that's integrated with Salesforce.com's CRM applications. The tools help businesses analyze customer data for customer retention and identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

Guavus Raises $30 Million

CEO: Anukool Lakhina

Guavus (http://www.guavus.com), a supplier of software for analyzing network-based data, raised $30 million in January, bringing its total equity financing to $78 million. Investor Growth Capital led the round with participation from QuestMark Partners and previous investors Intel Capital, Artiman Ventures and Sofinnova Ventures.

Guavus, based in San Mateo, Calif., captures and analyzes big data generated by IT operational systems, networks and sensors. Telecommunications companies and mobile service providers are major users. In January, the company acquired Neuralitic Systems, a developer of mobile data monetization and marketing analysis software.

HG Data Collects $2 Million

CEO: Craig Harris

HG Data (http://www.hgdata.com) raised $2 million in venture funding in March with Epic Ventures leading the round. That brings the company's total funding to $3.5 million.

Santa Barbara, Calif.-based HG Data developed a database of millions of business-to-business relationships and uses that information to generate lists of potential sales leads for customers. Clients also use the data for such purposes as targeted advertising.

HStreaming Brings In $1 Million

CEO: Jana Uhlig

HStreaming (http://www.hstreaming.com), a developer of realtime processing technology for Hadoop, raised $1 million from Atlas Venture in February -- the company's first outside financing.

HStreaming, based in San Francisco, specializes in making big data analytics tools that run on Hadoop for creating realtime dashboards and reports. That's significant because Hadoop is often seen as hampered by its batch-processing design. HStreaming performs analysis on both structured and unstructured data, the latter including data collected from such sources as video and embedded sensors.

Looker Data Sciences Sees $2 Million Come Its Way

CEO: Lloyd Tabb

Looker Data Sciences (http://looker.com), a business intelligence startup, received $2 million in funding from First Round Capital and PivotNorth in March. The company is based in San Francisco and Santa Cruz, Calif.

Calling itself "an entirely new approach to SQL analytics," Looker said its query-based, business-intelligence software does a better job of tapping into information in SQL databases than traditional business analytics software. The company's LookML proprietary language makes it easier to model stored data and develop simple or complex queries that are easy for information workers to use.

Founder and CEO Lloyd Tabb was principal engineer on Netscape Navigator Gold and helped define the creation of Mozilla.org.

MapR Technologies Locates $30 Million

CEO: John Schroeder

MapR Technologies (http://www.mapr.com), developer of a big data analytics system based on the popular Hadoop platform, snagged $30 million in third-round funding in March. The funding, led by new investor Mayfield Fund, brings the total amount of the San Jose, Calif.-based company's financing to $59 million. Other investors included Lightspeed Venture Partners, NEA and Redpoint Ventures, which all participated in earlier funding rounds.

MapR Technologies' software is built on a distribution of the open-source Apache Hadoop platform and HBase database from the Apache Software Foundation. The company extends Hadoop with a range of capabilities, including system recovery, mirroring, multitenancy and advanced data management -- all needed for mission-critical applications by businesses.

MarkLogic Closes On $25 Million In Financing

CEO: Gary Bloom

NoSQL database software developer MarkLogic (http://www.marklogic.com) closed on $25 million in venture capital in April. Funding in this latest round came from Sequoia Capital, Tenaya Capital and Northgate Capital, as well as from CEO Gary Bloom and other members of the company's executive team. Altogether, MarkLogic has raised $71.2 million in venture capital.

Developers of NoSQL (for "not only SQL") database software say their technologies provide better scalability and ability to handle unstructured data than traditional relational database products from major vendors such as Oracle. San Carlos, Calif.-based MarkLogic has been among the more visible NoSQL database vendors.

ParElastic Reaps $5.7 Million

CEO: Ken Rugg

ParElastic (http://www.parelastic.com) raised $5.7 million in funding from venture capital firms led by General Catalyst Partners. Other investors include Point Judith Capital, CommonAngels and Launch Capital. The company previously raised $3 million.

Waltham, Mass.-based ParElastic develops the ParElastic Database Virtualization Engine, which the company said increases the flexibility of relational database systems. Performing similar to a parallel database system, the technology basically makes multiple standard databases work together as a single, virtual database. That means businesses don't have to migrate off their existing databases to achieve scalability.

ScaleArc Pulls In $12.3 Million

Founder & CEO: Varun Singh

ScaleArc (http://www.scalearc.com), a developer of database scaling technology, brought in $12.3 million in January in a Series C round of funding led by Accel Partners, with participation from existing investors Trinity Ventures and Nexus Ventures.

ScaleArc, based in Santa Clara, Calif., develops the ScaleArc iDB database infrastructure software, which improves the performance of SQL databases that are choking on big data. The product sits between databases and applications, providing database administrators with visibility into database traffic and improving database scalability and availability through its dynamic clustering, load-balancing and sharding capabilities.

SevOne Nabs $150 Million

CEO: Michael Phelan

SevOne (http://www.sevone.com), a builder of appliances that help businesses capture and analyze operational systems data, raised $150 million from Bain Capital in January.

SevOne, based in Wilmington, Del., develops an IT management and reporting system for IT infrastructure monitoring, troubleshooting and performance management tasks. While there's been a lot of focus on big data generated by customer systems, social media and other sources, operational data generated by IT systems is also a big area for big data startups.

SiSense Collects $10 Million

CEO: Amit Bendov

Big data analytics software developer SiSense (http://www.sisense.com) raised $10 million in its second round of financing in April. Battery Ventures led the round of funding with participation from Opus Capital and Genesis Partners.

SiSense, based in Redwood Shores, Calif., positions its products as an alternative to traditional business analytics tools. The company's business analytics software, SiSense Prism, is designed to bring sophisticated, data-scientist-class capabilities to everyday information workers. The product uses advanced visualization capabilities that are designed for 64-bit microprocessors and a columnar data structure.

Think Big Analytics Takes In $3 Million

CEO: Ron Bodkin

Think Big Analytics (http://thinkbiganalytics.com), a startup solution provider making a splash in the big data market, raised $3 million in financing in April. Investors included angel investor and former Cisco executive Daniel Scheinman, along with venture capital firm WI Harper Group.

Founded in 2010 by former Quantcast executive Ron Bodkin and former C-Bridge executive Rick Farnell, Think Big Analytics is one of the first solution providers out of the gate to be exclusively focused on big data. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company provides a variety of big data-related services, ranging from consulting and engineering to the delivery of custom applications, and boasts deep experience working with Apache Hadoop, the open-source framework sitting at the forefront of the big data trend.

Zettaset Raises $10 Million

CEO: Jim Vogt

Zettaset (http://www.zettaset.com) raised $10 million in its second round of funding in January, as its solutions for automating and securing Apache Hadoop deployments continue to catch the eye of investors. The latest round of funding, added to the $3 million it locked down in July, was provided by venture capitalist firm HighBar Partners with additional contributions from Brocade, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Epic Ventures.

Zettaset, based in Mountain View, Calif., develops technology for automating and securing Hadoop deployments. At the core of its offerings is a software-only solution for cluster management that can be deployed across a wide variety of operating systems, Hadoop distributions and file systems, transparently integrating Big Data into existing environments.