Hadoop whisperer Concurrent slurps VC money

'In crisis there is opportunity'

Hadoop whisperer Concurrent has trousered $4m of VC money so the data analysis platform company can hire more people, extend its open source efforts and generally stay in business.

The $4 million in funding from VC firms True Ventures and Rembrandt Venture Partners was announced on Wednesday. It also sees the company take on a new CEO in the form of Gary Nakamura to allow the company's founder, Chris Wensel, to concentrate fully on the technical side.

Concurrent develops Cascading – a Java application wrapper for the Hadoop analytics system. The company has tried to make money by offering consultancy services to heavy users of the potent open source software, but that strategy appears to have failed.

"In crisis there is opportunity," Wensel told us via email. "By not having the capital and talent to boost our vision, we risk losing all we have done and will never reach the places we can see."

"Since I care about following through with my word to my early adopters that I would see Cascading through and not abandon it, I need to build a sustainable business around Cascading."

The $4m will go on hiring "a dozen or so" people with a particular emphasis on developers.

Every month, around 75,000 copies of Cascading are downloaded and the company believes the system is being run in production across "thousands" of businesses, Wensel said. The technology is in use at places like Twitter, eBay, and The Climate Corporation.

The company plans to use the money to fund further development of the Cascading platform, and to also develop a commercial project later in the year as well, Wensel said. ®