INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Datameer, the company that was born as a data prep startup on top of the open-source Hadoop project, announced a $40 million investment and
a big pivot away from Hadoop, while staying true to its big data roots.The investment was led by existing investor ST Telemedia
Existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Nextworld Capital, Citi Ventures and Top Tier Capital Partners also participated
Today’s investment brings the total raised to almost $140 million, according to Crunchbase data.Company CEO Christian Rodatus says the
company’s original mission was about making Hadoop easier to use for data scientists, business analysts and engineers
In the last year, the three biggest commercial Hadoop vendors — Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR — fell on hard times
Cloudera and Hortonworks merged and MapR was sold to HPE in a fire sale.Starting almost two years ago, Datameer recognized that against this
backdrop, it was time for a change
It began developing a couple of new products
It didn’t want to abandon its existing customer base entirely, of course, so it began rebuilding its Hadoop product and is now calling it
It is a modern cloud-native product built to run on Kubernetes, the popular open-source container orchestration tool
Instead of Hadoop, it will be based on Spark
He reports they are about two-thirds done with this pivot, but the product has been in the hands of customers.The company also announced
Neebo, an entirely new SaaS tool to give data scientists the ability to process data in whatever form it takes
Rodatus sees a world coming where data will take many forms, from traditional data to Python code from data analysts or data scientists to
He sees Neebo bringing all of this together in a managed service with the hope that it will free data scientists to concentrate on getting
It will work with data visualization tools like Tableau and Looker, and should be generally available in the coming weeks.The money should
help them get through this pivot, hire more engineers to continue the process and build a go-to-market team for the new products
It’s never easy pivoting like this, but the investors are likely hoping that the company can build on its existing customer base, while
taking advantage of the market need for data science processing tools
Time will tell if it works.
