Pitching A Means To Automate Data Processing, Xplenty Raises $3 Million

Selling itself as “Big data processing. Simplified.” the Tel Aviv-based Xplenty, which has developed technology to make data processing possible for professionals who aren’t versed in the arcane arts of Hadoop programming, has raised $3 million in a Series A round of financing.

Hadoop, the open-source software project that’s used to process large data sets in distributed computing environments, is everywhere mainly because it can work with data from different types of systems, including both structured and unstructured data. It’s used by most of the major technology companies and many companies in the Fortune 1000, and apparently it’s really hard to master.

“We can take Hadoop completely off the table for you,” says company chief executive and co-founder Yaniv Mor. “That’s the first level. The second level is the ability to create data flows and data processing on top of Hadoop without writing a single line of code. You just use a very intuitive graphical interface.”

Users would still need to be a data nerd to manipulate the information once it’s been through the Xplenty sausage grinder, but the technology allows anyone that has access to and understands data manipulation to create processing paths and execute them on Hadoop without actually having to know Hadoop.

“We’re dealing with the manipulation of data, the transformation of data, and the preparation of data for analytics,” says Mor. “This is to get data from a variety of data stores: get it, normalize it, clean it, and put that into your analytic data store of choice.”

While companies like Informatica have been providing on premise software for this kind of data manipulation for a while, Mor argues that they’re more retrofits and are not wholly cloud-based like Xplenty’s technology.

The company currently has 15 customers who pay based on the computing power they use. Financing from the round is going to be used to expand product features and invest in sales and marketing, specifically in the U.S.

Financing came from Magma Ventures (it’s the first investment from their new fund and the Russian venture capital firm Waarde Capital.

One thing that probably attracted the venture investors to the deal was the size of the market. Globally, Hadoop is expected to grow58% over the next six years,with capital spent on Hadoop technologies reaching $50 billion, according to data from Allied Market Research provided by Xplenty.

The company’s technology can run on top of Amazon’s web services, as well as Rackspace and IBM’s Softlayer, and can also be installed on-premises.