MapR Gets $110 Million To Improve Its Hadoop Distribution

US analytics expert MapR has attracted $110 million (£64.5m) in its latest funding round, led by Google Capital.

The Silicon Valley company will use the investment to fuel growth in the enterprise market and improve its Hadoop distribution, although it didn’t specify particular projects or geographies.

“We led this round of funding because we believe MapR has a great solution for enterprise customers, and they’ve built a strong and growing business,” said Gene Frantz, general partner at Google Capital, who will join MapR’s board of directors.

This is MapR’s largest funding round to date – it previously closed a $30 million round in March 2013, which brought the total investment since 2009 to $59 million.

Make it rain

MapR Technologies was founded in 2009 by some of the same people that developed BigTable analytics at Google. The company specialises in products based on the open source Apache Hadoop framework – which is quickly becoming the de-facto standard in distributed computing applications.

The popularity of the framework is explained by the fact that it relies on cheap local storage and not expensive, high-performance SAN or NAS systems. MapR contributes to several Hadoop-related open source projects, including HBase, Pig, Hive and ZooKeeper.

MapR products are currently employed by more than 500 customers across financial services, government, healthcare, manufacturing, media, retail and telecommunications. It will use the $110 million to considerably expand the client list.

The package consists of $80 million in equity funding from investors including Google Capital, Qualcomm Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, as well as a $30 million debt facility provided by the Silicon Valley Bank.

MapR says it has tripled bookings in the first quarter of 2014 over the same quarter in 2013, and the additional funds will help it expand internationally. Any money spent on development and engineering could be beneficial to open source projects that the company is actively involved in, including Apache Drill, Apache Spark and YARN.

“This investment round recognises our customers’ rapid adoption, their tremendous results and ROI, and also the capital efficiency of our business model,” said John Schroeder, CEO and co-founder of MapR Technologies.

“It’s extremely gratifying to bring these high-calibre strategic investors on board, including Qualcomm who is the leader in the mobile ecosystem and also at the forefront of the Internet of Things, to help us accelerate growth and position the company for global leadership.”

The logo which appears in this news story was introduced in February 2014.

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