MapR Closes $50 Million in Funding, Looks Ahead to an IPO

MapR Technologies, one of the fastest moving players in the Big Data arena, is marking new milestones and may be headed for an IPO very soon. The company announced an equity financing of $50 million. The additional funding accompanies yet another consecutive record quarter, according to the company, which reported more than a 100 percent increase in bookings over the prior year. MapR is particularly well-known for its focus on Hadoop.

Here are more details on where this company is headed.

MapR's $50 million equity financing was led by Future Fund, with participation from all existing investors, including: Google Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, New Enterprise Associates, Qualcomm Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures. With this financing, MapR has raised a total of $194 million in equity to date. And, the company is being direct about its intent to go public.

“Our ongoing momentum is fueled by a world-class team that is driving innovation and growth across every facet of our organization,” said John Schroeder, founder and CEO, MapR Technologies. “This new funding strengthens our balance sheet as we look ahead to an initial public offering.” 

“Demand for the MapR Converged Data Platform continues to grow as it enables customers to lower IT costs by unifying data into a single platform and simultaneously drive innovative applications to generate new revenue streams,” said Matt Mills, president, MapR Technologies. “MapR addresses the transition of on premise to cloud computing by unifying all data within a single converged data architecture.” 

“Enterprise computing is going through one of the biggest transformations in decades and companies that are serious about leveraging data as a disruptive advantage are relying on MapR,” said Barry Eggers, managing partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Indeed, in interviews we've done with leaders at MapR, we learned that the company is very focused on sea changes in how companies deal with their massive data stores: "For forty years the relational database was basically a monopoly—the only game in town. Only in the last five years, and especially right now, are we seeing the rise of non-relational data stores. That’s due to two things: the volume of data has grown incredibly, and the data itself is rapidly changing with developers adding new fields and changing the structure of the data."

As we've also covered numerous times, enteprises are wrestling with the complexity of Hadoop as they try to yield Big Data-driven insights.  MapR's new SpyGlass initiative is targeted to help customers leverage greater administrator productivity and more sophisticated cluster management. The initiative is also targeted to ease administration, which is much needed. For more on Spyglass, see our coverage here.