MapR Closes $110 Million Financing Led by Google Capital

MapR Technologies, Inc., provider of the distribution for Apache Hadoop, has completed a $110 million financing.

Google Capital led the $80 million equity financing. Also participating was Qualcomm Incorporated, through its venture investment group, Qualcomm Ventures, and existing investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, NEA and Redpoint Ventures.

In addition to the equity financing, MapR completed a debt facility of $30 million led by Silicon Valley Bank.

“MapR helps companies around the world deploy Hadoop rapidly and reliably, generating significant business results,” said Gene Frantz, general partner, Google Capital. “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.“

In conjunction with this investment, Frantz will join the board of directors.

“Google has a long-standing commitment to Hadoop, making Google Capital an ideal investor for MapR. This investment round recognizes 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, MapR. “It’s extremely gratifying to bring these high-caliber 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. Our installed base of more than 500 paying licensees provides a strong foundation and we are excited to move forward with the tremendous resources from our new and current financial investors.“

The financing will be used by MapR to continue its growth in the big data and analytics segment. MapR tripled bookings in the first quarter of 2014 over 2013 and the new funding will increase worldwide go-to-market programs to accelerate the deployment of MapR in mission-critical, real-time, and operational use cases.

“Hadoop is a cornerstone for the big data ecosystem, and MapR has demonstrated its leadership in the space,” said Albert Wang, director, Qualcomm Ventures. “We invested in MapR because of the strength of its technology in leveraging the expanding Internet of Things and providing immediate business benefits.”

MapR has significant production Hadoop environments in financial services, healthcare, media, retail, telecommunications, and Web 2.0 companies.

The investment will also fund additional engineering resources to further its technology advantage and support open source projects, such as Apache Drill, Hadoop 2.2 with YARN, and Apache Spark.

Comments

Investors are really excited by Apache Hadoop, the open-source software framework for storage and large-scale processing of data-sets on clusters of commodity hardware. Together Cloudera,Hortonworks and MapR, three start-ups focused on Hadoop, got a total of $1.4 billion financial funding since their inception.

And since the beginning of the year:

Last March Hortonworks got $100 million in funding.

More impressive: last April, Cloudera wraps up $900 million round, the largest amount for a single round in the history of the storage industry, following $160 million in thee rounds to reach a total of $1,041 million raised - the following records being $544 million by Pillar Data then acquired by Oracle in 2011, and Box with $404.5 milllion.

Now it's MapR with $110 million, a huge sum after getting $59 million in three rounds including $20 million in 2011 and $30 million in 2013, and consequently total now reaching $169 million.

Largest financial rounds for storage start-ups
($100 million and more)

Year

Company

Amount
in $ million

2014

Cloudera

900

2012

Box

150

2013

Pure Storage

150

2011

Box

150

2014

MapR

110

2001

Nutanix

101

2014

Actifio

100

2013

Box

100

2014

Hortonworks

100

According to a recent report by Allied Market Research titled Hadoop Market (Hardware, Software, Services and HaaS, End Use Application, and Geography) - Industry Growth Trends and Forecasts Through 2020, the global Hadoop market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 58.2% from $2.0 billion in 2013 to $50.2 billion by 2020. Increase in demand for big data analytics is the major driver for this market.

MapR tripled bookings from 1Q13 to 1Q14 with approximately 90% of its sales from subscription-based product licenses, with several customers paying more than $1 million, and the software company has high margins. Today the company claims 500 paying licensees.

Read also:
Start-Up's Profile: MapR
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