Big Data firm Qubole raises $13M Series B funding from Norwest, others

Bangalore- and US-based Big Data company Qubole Inc. has secured $13 million in its Series B round of financing led by Norwest Venture Partners. The proceeds from this round will be used to acquire more clients.

With the fresh round, the investment raised by Qubole so far has touched $20 million.

The company had earlier raised $7 million in Series A funding from Charles River Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Venky Harinarayan (founding partner of Cambrian Ventures) and Anand Rajaraman (senior vice-president at Walmart Global eCommerce), in April last year.

"Our mission is to help every company leverage Big Data to make a meaningful business impact," said Ashish Thusoo, CEO and co-founder of Qubole.

"We have seen tremendous adoption for our self-service platform and expect this to accelerate as our customers experience the incredible business outcomes that occur when everyone can access, process and collaborate with cloud data," he added.

The startup was founded in 2011 by IIT Delhi alumni Thusoo and Joydeep Sen Sarma. Prior to Qubole, they built and ran social networking site Facebook's data service. Thusoo also worked with companies such as Identity Engines and Oracle Corporation, and holds an MS degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (the US). Sarma had earlier worked at Yahoo Inc, Network Appliance, Datsi Appliance and Oracle. He holds an MS in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh (the US).

Qubole offers a platform to empower developers and non-developers to access Big Data generated by their companies to gain insights at a cost-effective rate. Its flagship product, QDS, runs on Hadoop infrastructure where users can analyse and collaborate with their company's data. QDS helps IT organisations use cloud infrastructure (Google Compute, Amazon Web Services or Azure) to access data while eliminating expenditures associated with maintaining hardware.

Qubole's clients include Pinterest, Quora, MediaMath, TubeMogul, Answers.com, Videoplaza and Pubmatic.

"Qubole is changing the Big Data conversation by tapping the power of the public cloud to provide a simple, cost-effective solution that turns the complicated task of analysing data into a seamless everyday business process," said Rama Sekhar of Norwest.

"The Qubole team includes some of the most innovative entrepreneurs in the industry who are committed to meeting the evolving data needs of enterprises," Sekhar added.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)