Data-as-a-service provider Qubole has secured $13 million in a series B financing led by Norwest Venture Partners. This brings the total investment in the company to $20 million. Earlier in 2013, Qubole had got funding from Light Speed Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Anand Rajaraman, and Venky Harinarayan.
The company was also one of the 13 companies incubated by Microsoft Accelerator in 2013. Qubole’s founders Joydeep Sen Sarma and Ashish Thusoo had previously develop Apache Hive, Facebook’s big data infrastructure.
Qubole’s flagship product, QDS, runs the Hadoop infrastructure where both developers and non-developers can easily analyze and collaborate with their company’s data. QDS gives provides IT organizations the option to use cloud infrastructures such as Google Compute, Amazon Web Services and Azure to provide users with self-service access to data and helps cut capital expenditures for maintaining hardware and support staff.
Qubole counts Pinterest, Quora, MediaMath and TubeMogul as its customers. The company also claims that it processes 83 petabytes of data every month and its customers have conducted more than 4.96 million compute hours of data analysis in November on the QDS service.
Other developments in big data analytics
- Earlier in July, Mumbai-based big data analysis firm Peel-Works has secured a $2 million investment from IDG Ventures India and Inventus Capital Partners.
- In March Mumbai-based big data analytics firm Germin8 has raised $3 million in Series A funding from Kalaari Capital. Germin8 has developed a product called Explic8 which helps brands analyse conversation aggregated from public sources like social media & news sites and company-owned sources like emails & chats in real-time and convert them into leads.
- Mobile VAS company Altruist Technologies has acquired Hong Kong and Kolkata-based analytics company iConnectiva in September. iConnectiva provides fraud management, revenue assurance and big data analytics solutions among others to telecom, media and utility companies.
- Indix with offices in Chennai and Seattle has raised $8.5 million co-led by Avalon Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners. Indix’s product offerings include a product intelligence application for brands and retailers, and APIs for products, prices, promotions and stores. It can help brands and retailers discover insights on pricing and assortment in real-time, apart from monitoring products and sellers across a market.
It is interesting to note that the big data analytics market is increasingly becoming saturated and Forbes points out that the market is unlikely to be able to support this many vendors so expect to see some consolidation a year or two down the track.
