Carl Durrek
Databricks, the commercial entity created by the developers of the open source Apache Spark project, announced $33 million in Series B funding today and the launch of a new cloud product, their first one as a company. There is little doubt that big data is a big deal these days and companies are popping up to help customers process the data. Databricks hopes to simplify the entire matter by moving it to the cloud to reduce management headaches, while speeding it up by using Apache Spark to drive the platform. The latest round gives the company a huge financial boost and CEO Ian Stoica says, they hope to increase the number of employees and expand rapidly.
Apache Spark, with its promise of making big-data software far easier and faster to use, has become one of the most popular open-source software projects. Now Databricks Inc. has raised another $33 million in funding to commercialize it. The Series B round, which an investor said venture firms were clamoring to join, was led by New Enterprise Associates and includes current investor Andreessen Horowitz, taking the company’s total funding to $47 million. Valuation isn’t disclosed. Databricks’ technical foundation, Apache Spark, was developed at the University of California, Berkeley, and is now connected with the university’s AMPLab. (AMP stands for Algorithms Machines People). The lab launched in 2011 to do research on data-related projects that cut across traditional academic disciplines and is sponsored by a couple of dozen tech companies, including Google Inc., Amazon Web Services Inc. and SAP AG. Spark unifies what until now have been disparate components of Hadoop, according to Berkeley Computer Science professor and Databricks Chief Executive Ion Stoica, providing a single framework for data streaming, machine learning, graph processing, SQL (the most common language for querying databases) and other functions so that users don’t have to manually set up and integrate all these tools themselves.
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