RainStor, makers of a “NewSQL” database, announced that it has received a $12 million series C round led by Credit Suisse and Rogers Venture Partners with participation by previous investors Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, Storm Ventures and The Dow Chemical Company. The company has now raised at least $23.5 million.
RainStor develops a relational database that focuses on using compression to make it easier to handle large amounts of data. It claims to be able to reduce data storage requirements by 40-fold, reducing storage space and backup times.
RainStor originally focused on using its technology to power data-archiving software (both on-premise and in the cloud), but in January the company released a version of its product that runs “natively” on Apache Hadoop. It’s not a connector — it actually runs on the Hadoop stack with no need to pipe data back and forth. This enables users to compress data stored in Hadoop and use traditional SQL queries instead of writing map reduce code, all the while leaving Hadoop intact for data scientists who do want to use map reduce.
RainStor was originally called Clearpace. The company raised $4 million from Doughty Hanson and Dow Corporate Venture Capital in 2009. It changed its name to RainStor later that year and raised a $7.5 million Series B round in 2010 from Storm Ventures and data-integration company Informatica.
The new round will go toward expanding the company’s engineering, sales and marketing teams.