NoSQL database software developer MarkLogic closed on $25 million in venture financing, the latest big data company to raise a significant amount of venture capital.
MarkLogic said it would use the money to boost its go-to-market efforts and compete against what it calls "incumbent relational databases." Developers of NoSQL (for "not only SQL") database software say their technologies provide better scalability and ability to handle unstructured data than traditional relational database products from major vendors such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.
"Enterprise customers are discovering that the relational databases they have relied on for years are not flexible and agile enough to manage complex and varied data formats that are required for modern applications," said Gary Bloom, president and CEO of MarkLogic, in a statement. "They also recognize that they cannot lower their standards for enterprise capabilities like transactional consistency, security, backup, recovery, high availability and alerting."
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Bloom, who took the CEO reins at MarkLogic last year, worked at Oracle for 14 years, including heading up the company's database business. He also served as CEO of Veritas Software and president of Symantec following its merger with Veritas in 2005.
Founded in 2001, San Carlos, Calif.-based MarkLogic is hardly a startup. But its visibility has risen in recent years with the increasing industry focus on big data, the growing volume and variety of structured and unstructured information that businesses find themselves struggling to manage and analyze.
This week MarkLogic held its user conference in Las Vegas where it demonstrated new capabilities in its software, including dynamic database provisioning and rebalancing, and new tiered storage and semantics technology.
MarkLogic is the latest in a string of big data-related companies to capture generous amounts of venture funding. SiSense, a big data analysis software developer, raised $10 million in venture funding earlier this month, while MapR Technologies, which develops software around the Hadoop big data platform, raised $30 million.
Altogether MarkLogic has raised $71.2 million in venture capital. Funding in this latest round came from Sequoia Capital, Tenaya Capital and Northgate Capital, as well as from Bloom and other members of the company's executive team, the company said.
PUBLISHED APRIL 11, 2013
