Platfora Secures $5.7 Million in Series A Funding Led by Andreessen Horowitz for Big Data Business Intelligence
Sept. 8, 2011 – PALO ALTO, Calif. – Platfora (www.platfora.com), a startup focused on generating effortless insights from big data, today announced that it raised $5.7 million in Series A funding to expand and accelerate development of its intuitive and richly interactive BI and analytics platform for data stored in Hadoop.
Andreessen Horowitz led the round and General Partner Scott Weiss is joining the board. In-Q-Tel, the independent strategic investment firm that identifies innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the U.S. intelligence community, also participated in the funding round.
“Businesses are increasingly looking to Hadoop, rather than traditional databases, to store their fast-growing datasets,” said Ben Werther, founder and CEO of Platfora. “We transform Hadoop from promising back-end technology into an effortless, interactive and beautiful way for business users to get rapid insight and answers from any sized dataset, even those with petabytes of information.”
Hadoop is the industry’s leading path to a low cost and massively scalable data infrastructure, but it lacks the interactivity and sophisticated reporting capabilities needed by business users. Platfora works with existing Hadoop clusters, including Cloudera, MapR, and Amazon EMR, among others, and automatically turns the questions of business users into dimensional and predictive dashboards, reports and insights. The company’s innovative server architecture enables sub-second report delivery, analytics overlay, and drilldown performance.
“There is a dramatic shift occurring in the enterprise software market right now and we believe Platfora is uniquely positioned to help businesses easily process large quantities of data,” said Scott Weiss, general partner with Andreessen Horowitz. “Hadoop was a big first step for the industry, but Platfora will enable businesses to tap into its full potential.”
Platfora helps customers explore, interact with, and derive insight from arbitrarily large data sets, while eliminating the need for traditional data warehouses, ETL tools and the legacy BI products of the past. The company is focused on delivering a beautiful, intuitive and dynamic user interface, and serving the needs of diverse industries including web, advertising, finance, telecommunications, logistics and federal intelligence.
“The big data challenge extends across both the government and commercial markets and we see opportunities for applying Platfora’s innovative approach in both,” said T.J. Rylander, partner on IQT’s Investments team. “The advances in the usability of scalable data infrastructure technology that Platfora is developing would have broad applicability for our customers in the U.S. Intelligence Community.”
About Platfora
Platfora is a software company based in Palo Alto, Calif., building a revolutionary BI and analytics platform that democratizes and simplifies use of big data and Hadoop. The company was founded by Ben Werther, former product head of Greenplum, an analytical database company acquired by EMC. Platfora is assembling a superb team of data and distributed systems architects/engineers, UI and UX developers, and data scientists. For more information, visit www.platfora.com.
About Andreessen Horowitz
Andreessen Horowitz is a stage-agnostic venture capital firm that provides seed, venture and growth-stage funding to the best new technology companies. Founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz helps entrepreneurs become successful CEOs and build important and enduring companies. Its general partners are Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, John O’Farrell, Scott Weiss, Jeff Jordan and Peter Levine, all widely recognized experts in the creation, scaling and operation of high growth technology companies. The firm has $1.2 billion under management across two funds. Among its 60 investments are Facebook, Foursquare, Groupon, Skype, Twitter and Zynga. The firm was established in June 2009 and is located in Menlo Park, California. For more information, visit www.a16z.com.
About In-Q-Tel
In-Q-Tel is the not-for-profit, strategic investment firm that works to identify, adapt, and deliver innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the U.S. Intelligence Community. Launched in 1999 as a private, independent organization, IQT’s mission is to identify and partner with companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve the national security interests of the United States. For more information, visit www.iqt.org.
For More Information:
Kate McEwan
The OutCast Agency
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Ben Werther Bio
Ben is Founder and CEO of Platfora, a new startup focused on building a revolutionary BI and analytics platform that democratizes and simplifies use of big data and Hadoop. Ben previously served as VP of Products at DataStax, the commercial leader in Apache Cassandra, and, before that, as Director of Product Management at EMC’s Data Computing Products Division (formerly Greenplum Software). At Greenplum, Ben led product management for the company, and drove product strategy, prioritization and product definition. Prior to Greenplum, Ben was at Microsoft where he was responsible for planning of the ‘post-Longhorn’ Windows Server platform and strategic planning for Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization platform. Ben was a CS PhD candidate at Stanford University, and holds an MS from Stanford University and a B.Comp(Hons) from Monash University (Australia). |
