Hortonworks announced on its blog this morning that it has raised $50 million in new financing to accelerate the growth and development of its Hadoop distribution for data analytics and the application in operations and transaction-based systems.
The investment was led by new investors Tenaya Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group, with participation from existing investors Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Yahoo!
It was just this morning that I read that Hortonworks looked like a potential acquisition target. So the news here is significant in itself that investors have confidence in the company and its opportunities.
Hortonworks spun out of Yahoo! in 2011 and competes with companies like Cloudera and MapR. The company’s business model revolves on its close association with Apache Hadoop and its viability as a data platform. It is a chief contributor to Hadoop 2.0 and Apache Hadoop Yarn, viewed as the next-generation of the Hadoop platform.
The Hadoop market is starting to boom. It seems that companies suddenly realize that analytics are increasingly important. The investment helps Hortonworks compete in a space against a host of startups such as Datameer and Karmasphere as well as enterprise players such as IBM and EMC.