MapD Technologies, a startup that provides businesses with a data analytics service backed by graphics processing units (GPUs), announced today that it has secured an additional $25 million.
The startup combines a GPU engine with visual analytics, allowing data analysts and data scientists to run queries on billions of rows of data. Initially, MapD was only available as a cloud service on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and IBM SoftLayer. But MapD is now also available as on-premises software.
“Organizations are struggling to keep up with the exponential rise in data volumes they are facing using CPU compute,” wrote MapD’s founder and CEO Todd Mostak, in an email to VentureBeat. “This is driving a huge uptick in adoption of GPUs, and we are pushing to broaden that adoption curve to encompass analytic SQL and visualization workloads.”
MapD claims to have dozens of customers across different sectors, such as energy, financial services, and retail. According to Mostak, Verizon uses MapD to accelerate its log analytics workloads, the U.S. government deploys the software to query and visualize geospatial data, and a New York City-based hedge fund uses it to find tradable insights. MapD sells annual subscriptions with support contracts.
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Competitors include the very companies on which MapD runs its cloud service. AWS offers databases and a business intelligence tool, for example. IBM, Oracle, and others also pose competition in the database and analytics areas. Aside from these, Mostak names smaller GPU players like Kinetica, SQream, and BlazingDB as companies competing in this sector.
New Enterprise Associates (NEA) led today’s round. Existing investors Nvidia, Vanedge Capital, and Verizon Ventures also joined. To date, MapD has raised a total of $37 million. It will use the new capital for hiring in sales and marketing and to further development of the product.
MapD was founded in 2013 and is based in San Francisco, where it currently employs approximately 30 people.
