RainStor Secures $12 Million in Series C

RainStor Inc., provider of database solutions for big data, has raised $12 million in Series C funding from financial services organization, Credit Suisse and Rogers Venture Partners.

Existing investors Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, Storm Ventures and The Dow Chemical Company also participated in the round.

The new funding will be used to accelerate engineering, expand team across direct and indirect sales and marketing to maintain big data market leadership serving financial services, government, communications and other sectors driving the big data wave.

RainStor provides a database, which through patented industry leading compression enables the enterprise to manage and analyze petabyte scale at the lowest total cost. RainStor’s database has been adopted by over 100 global enterprises today addressing the challenge of managing big data, meeting compliance regulations and providing business users analytic access to diverse and virtually unlimited volumes of data. Customers can deploy RainStor across low cost scalable hardware platforms including SAN, NAS, CAS in addition to cloud and operates natively on Apache Hadoop. RainStor provides analytic and query access via standard SQL, popular BI tools and native MapReduce when running on HDFS.

"We are very excited about this new investment which will not only help speed our growth in the big data market but is tremendous validation from the financial services and communications companies which we have been serving for a number of years. Banks and communications operators have been living with big data for a long time and they absolutely require an enterprise-grade, standards based database that will allow them to scale and grow their information centric businesses at an acceptable cost," commented John Bantleman, RainStor’s CEO.

"RainStor is exemplary of the kind of company in which Rogers Venture Partners looks to invest: at the forefront of an exciting market opportunity, management with a proven track record, and momentum that underscores and validates its market approach and unique database technology. The RainStor team are contributing significantly to the big data market, directly addressing the needs of telecommunications operators worldwide and we are very happy to support them on this journey," said Voytek Siewierski, partner at Rogers Venture Partners.

"Driven by compliance regulations, banks and financial institutions are now required to retain and analyze petabytes of data. Compounded by rapid growth, current needs exceed the capacity of existing database and data warehouse environments. RainStor has built a unique combination of database capabilities that have proven essential for financial institutions in order to sustain growth levels in the most cost effective way, while meeting regulatory needs. At Credit Suisse, we invest in technology companies where we see tremendous value for our own business and market needs," said Peter Norley, managing director at Credit Suisse and global COO of equities and global arbitrage trading.

RainStor’s partners include Amdocs, Anritsu, AdaptiveMobile, Dell, HP, Qosmos and Teradata.

Founded in 2004, the firm is a privately-held company with offices in San Francisco, CA and Gloucester, UK.