Data management technology startup NorthScale has secured $10 million in a Series B funding led by Mayfield Fund, Accel Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners participating in the round. This brings NorthScale’s total funding up to $15 million. The company is also announcing the addition of Bob Wiederhold as president and chief executive officer of NorthScale.
NorthScale’s data management technology, which was released to the public a few weeks ago, is designed for web-based companies, particularly startups that deal with large amounts of transactional data. For example, social gaming giant Zynga has been using NorthScale since December. Founded by leaders of the memcached open source project, NorthScale is like Cloudera for Hadoop or Red Hat for Linux; the startup is commercializing the open source technology. As web applications generate vast volumes of data, there is a need for a data management technology that caters towards transactional software systems. NorthScale’s elastic data infrastructure software promises to cache frequently used data while also offering performance and scalability.
Wiederhold was previously the CEO and president of virtualization company Transitive Corporation, which was acquired by IBM in 2008. The new funding will be used to continue the company’s investment in innovation around noSQL database technologies and for sales and marketing efforts.
The NorthScale Memcached Server also includes the ability to securely support multiple applications on a shared cluster, and allows a memcached cluster to dynamically change with automatic client updates. The NorthScale Membase Server is a high‐performance, distributed key‐value database which builds on the NorthScale Memcached Server foundation and is directly compatible with memcached APIs and client libraries.
Currently Zynga and NHN are using NorthScale as a foundations for shared data management infrastructure. Founded in 2009, NorthScale faces competition from Gear6.