Today Palo Alto, CA-based Continuuity, a big data application platform, announced the closing of a $10 million Series A funding round led by Battery Ventures and Ignition Partners in addition to previous investors Andreessen Horowitz, Data Collective, and Amplify Partners. It launched its big data hosting platform, the Continuuity AppFabric, in October in addition to its developer’s suite, which provides developers a Hadoop ecosystem to quickly build, scale, and manage big data applications. The company plans to use the funding primarily towards ramping up product development and its go-to-market efforts.
The company’s leadership team consists of ex-Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook employees used to solving big data problems around consumer intelligence and turning user data into actionable end results for marketers. BetaKit spoke with co-founders Todd Papaioannou and Jonathan Gray, who believe that their platform, which helps accelerate enterprise application development, is the next major leap for the industry. “We’re really focused on developers, right now Java developers and raising the level of abstraction and providing a unified experience around building big data applications. We talk about covering the horizontal application development lifecycle, which for us means from prototype to production,” said Gray in an interview.
Touted as being built by developers for developers, Continuuity strives to offer an end-to-end solution to manage the entire application lifecycle. It provides a suite for developers preloaded with a software development kit (SDK), application programming interfaces (APIs), and documentation capabilities to speed up the prototyping process. The company’s Continuuity AppFabric product then helps developers run the app, test for bugs and get it ready for deployment, which is done with a click of a button that prompts users to push the application to a private cloud server.
Currently, the company’s developer suite, which includes both the SDK, code and data libraries, in addition to the single-node version of AppFabric, is available for free to help developers get going on their big data application idea. It charges for developers who want to deploy an app to its private cloud, and offers options where Continuuity can either provide the hosting or it can layer over the company’s existing Hadoop cluster. It also will be rolling out its public cloud down the road, where it hopes to take out the existing infrastructure complexity and make it easier for developers to deploy their applications.
With the funding under its belt, the company will be rolling out its customer acquisition strategy and building out its public cloud product, due for launch in 2013. “People really recognize that for the Hadoop market and ecosystem to take off and succeed there need to be applications. You can’t just have an infrastructure market with no application,” Papaioannou added. “People don’t want to pay for infrastructure, they want to pay for apps and business strategy, so this will the next wave of application development, innovation and experimentation in applications for the Hadoop ecosystem.”
The big data space has been getting a lot of investor attention over the past year. Just yesterday BetaKit covered Platfora’s $20 million round, in addition to a $5.7 million investment in 2011 to help scale its platform to help companies make sense of and visualize their data. Another big data solutions provider, DataStax, also raised $25 million in Series C funding in October to help companies mine and analyze their data. With more marketers looking to use big data to help affect their bottom line, and more developers trying to build applications to leverage big data, it’s likely a trend that will continue.