by Angela Guess
Jaikumar Vijayan of Computerworld recently reported that investors are pouring big money into Big Data. He writes, “Surging enterprise demand for tools that can manipulate and analyze massive volumes of structured and unstructured data has caught investor attention in a big way. Top venture and growth capital firms in recent months have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into companies selling the so-called “big data” technologies. Venture capital firm Accel Partners has even established a $100 million fund to finance the early stages and growth of big data companies. The latest beneficiary of the trend is big data software maker Birst, which on Wednesday announced that it has received $26 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Hummer Winblad and DAG Ventures.”
He continues, “Birst has raised $46 million from investors since its founding in 2005. Birst was launched as a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) service. It recently began positioning the technology as tools for analyzing and gleaning intelligence from massive petabyte-scale data sets. Birst is just the latest provider of big data tools to feel investor love. In November, Cloudera closed a $40 million round of funding led by Ignition Partners, Greylock Partners and Accel Partners. Cloudera, which sells and supports a commercial version of the open-source Hadoop big data technology, has so far raised more than $75 million overall from investors.”
