Today San Mateo, CA-based big data company DataStax announced it has raised $25 million in C round of funding led by Meritech Capital Partners, with participation from previous investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Crosslink Capital. The company works with over 200 customers that include Netflix, GameFly, and ConstantContact in addition to 14 of the Fortune 100, all of which has resulted in a 400 percent growth over the course of the past year, with the company looking to double that over the coming year.
The company launched in 2010, and has seen a rise in demand for its big data platform, which powers enterprise applications for organizations of all sizes and has gone from 15 employees to 60 since last year and will be looking to grow that number by 30 percent over the next few months. “The first place we’re going to put the money is turning to how do we focus on our customers, how do we grow so we can aid them in what they need, and that happens on the product development side, and sales and marketing side,” CEO Billy Bosworth said in an interview. “We have to be able to tell people what we do, we have to help them make the right decisions, and we have to get people who can walk them through the process, the great thing about this space is that it’s a very consultative sale, people come to us looking for help, they want trusted advice, and we really try and build our company around the premise that we’re going to help you cut through the hype of big data.”
DataStax provides companies wit a NoSQL database management system (DBMS) solution built on Apache Cassandra, an open-source software, which enables them to process large volumes of a real-time online data and the ability to manage, search, and analyze it all from the same cluster.
“We are used in real-time systems where there is very heavy customer interaction, or very heavy device interaction, such that the customer has a critical part of their system, and they need to scale it in a very big way,” Bosworth said. “As an example, one of the companies we work with is Netflix, and Netflix powers their entire streaming business on top of our technology. Everything about their user experience, how they collect that data when you sign on to watch movies, how it knows where the movies stop, when you start watching on another device and how it knows where to pick up, how it’s always available, how they make sure your experience is fantastic, all that is driven on our Cassandra product.”
It competes head-to-head with the likes of software giants MySQL and its parent company Oracle’s database management solutions. However Bosworth said DataStax’s technology is flexible and can be augmented or built on top of existing infrastructures when they no longer meet the growing needs of customers. Additionally, it faces the traditional risks of being an open-source based platform.
“Sometimes our biggest competition is actually ourselves, meaning somebody may wish to try and go just use the pure Apache version of Cassandra and want to try to do it on their own, and then we want to bring the value to Cassandra with our whole DataStax enterprise platform on top of it,” Bosworth added. “When you’re an open source company, you do want to treat your community well and make sure they have everything they need, and that’s just part of how you do business as an open-source company.”
With a continuing focus on building a product that makes it easier for companies to tackle their big data problems, DataStax will look to be the go-to platform for companies to build their enterprise applications. In addition, the company has gotten a lot of inbound requests globally and will be expanding its sales and marketing efforts outside of the U.S. market with their sights set initially on Latin America. With the Series C funding under their belt, and a growing number of customers ranging from household names to startups, the company hopes to find similar success in the global market.