Google Among Latest Investors In Hadoop Supplier MapR Technologies

Big data software company MapR Technologies has raised $110 million in Series D financing, the company said Monday, including funding from first-time investor Google Capital.

MapR, which competes against Cloudera, Hortonworks and other distributors of the Apache Hadoop big data platform, said it would use the financing to continue its growth in the big data and business analytics markets.

The company recently reported that this year's first-quarter sales bookings were triple the bookings in the first quarter of 2013. This week the company said it has more than 500 paying licensees.

The new funding includes $80 million in equity financing and a debt facility of $30 million led by Silicon Valley Bank. Google Capital led the equity investors, which also included Qualcomm Ventures (Qualcomm's venture investment group) and existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, NEA and Redpoint Ventures.

"We led this round of funding because we believe MapR has a great solution for enterprise customers, and they've built a strong and growing business," said Gene Frantz, Google Capital general partner, in a statement. Frantz is joining MapR's board of directors.

Big data management and business analytics has been one of the hottest segments of the IT industry, particularly in terms of attracting venture capital. In March MapR competitors Cloudera and Hortonworks raised $900 million and $100 million, respectively.

"This investment round recognizes our customers' rapid adoption, their tremendous results and ROI, and also the capital efficiency of our business model," said John Schroeder, MapR CEO and co-founder, in a statement.

MapR said it would specifically use the financing to grow its engineering resources, particularly to support open-source projects such as Apache Drill, Apache Spark and Hadoop 2.2 with YARN. The financing will also be used to expand the company's global sales and marketing programs.

PUBLISHED JULY 1, 2014