MapR Raises $110 Million in Round Led by Google Capital

There’s been another big round of funding for a player in the steadily growing world of Hadoop, the open-source big data technology.

MapR announced this morning that it had raised $110 million in combined equity and debt financing. The $80 million equity-bearing portion of the round was led by Google Capital, the search giant’s growth equity fund, with participation from Qualcomm Ventures, the investment arm of the wireless chip company. Prior investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, NEA and Redpoint Ventures also participated.

In addition to the growth capital funding, MapR also raised a $30 million debt facility led by Silicon Valley Bank. The deals bring MapR’s total resources raised to date to $174 million. Its most recent round was a $30 million Series C led by Mayfield announced about 15 months ago.

MapR is one of three companies that has made a name for itself by building a business around Hadoop, the open-source technology that aims to help companies analyze big data and analytics questions to increase profits or reduce costs. MapR, which competes with both Cloudera and Hortonworks, prides itself on having built an industrial-grade version of Hadoop tuned for high availability and data protection.

The funding is the third nine-figure funding deal for a Hadoop company this year, and brings the total invested in the space this year to north of $1.1 billion. The biggest was Cloudera’s $900 million round led by Intel, which invested $740 million, announced in March. The deal was preceded by a $100 million round at Hortonworks led by the investment firm BlackRock and Passport Capital.

Hadoop itself is an open-source project overseen by the nonprofit Apache Foundation and originally sprang out of Yahoo. The core team that created it went on to start Hortonworks.

For the last several years, Hadoop has largely been considered to be in something of an experimental phase. As companies have struggled to get their heads around “big data” — the notion that useful business insights can come from a thorough analysis of data gathered in the course of daily operations — they have increasingly turned to Hadoop technologies to simplify the process.

But after a few years of that experimentation, the sense turned in a big way this year toward taking the technology into a more operational phase. A recent IDC survey of 202 large companies that had been experimenting with Hadoop found that nearly a third of them had moved it to production environments, and roughly another third planned to do so within a year or less.

MapR says it has 500 paying licensees and that bookings in the first quarter of 2014 were triple those seen in the prior year. (But as is typical with startups, it doesn’t disclose those figures.) The company says it plans to use the new funding to boost its global go-to-market efforts.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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