Data Warehouse Startup Yellowbrick Data Raises $81 Million In Series C Financing

Data warehouse appliance maker Yellowbrick Data has raised $81 million in Series C funding, the company said this week, financing the company will use to expand its sales and marketing operations worldwide and accelerate its product development efforts.

"We're fueling the growth of our business," said Gary Orenstein, Yellowbrick chief product and marketing officer, in an interview with CRN. Some of the funding also will be applied to assembling the startup's nascent channel program. "Our channel program initiatives are in the early development stages," Orenstein said.

Yellowbrick markets turnkey data warehouse appliances for on-premises data warehouse implementations or as a core component of a hybrid cloud/on-premises data warehouse.

[Related: The Coolest Emerging Big Data Companies Of The Big Data 100 2019]

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company is especially targeting owners of aging data warehouse systems from Netezza: IBM acquired the company in 2010 and is discontinuing support for older models. And some owners of older data warehouse systems from Teradata and other vendors are seeking alternatives, according to Orenstein.

Despite the growing use of cloud data warehouse services from Snowflake Computing, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, Orenstein said most businesses and organizations continue to install on-premises data warehouses—either stand-alone or as part of a hybrid system—with only a small percentage adopting a cloud-only approach.

"That seems to be driving a lot of interest in the Yellowbrick approach," Orenstein said, arguing that cloud-only data warehouses are more applicable for large corporate users.

Some observers expected Hadoop to catch on as a data warehouse alternative, but that hasn't happened either, as evidenced by the recent struggles of Hadoop system vendors like MapR Technologies and Cloudera.

The new round of funding brings Yellowbrick Data's total financing to $173 million. The Series C funding came from new investors IVP and BMWi Ventures, as well as existing investors DFJ Growth, Next47, Third Point Ventures, Menlo Ventures, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Threshold Ventures and Samsung.