The Qubole team is proud to announce the completion of the Series A funding round. This brings the total investment to $7 million from Charles River Ventures and Lightspeed Ventures as well as through angel investment from Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaram. This capitalization has reinforced and validated Qubole's rise as the innovative start-up to watch in Big Data.

Qubole has also passed a major milestone in processed data volume, breaking the half petabyte mark since coming out of beta. Qubole Data Service is now open to enterprises of all sizes, and free trial accounts are available. Says CEO Ashish Thusoo, "We have reached a critical point where our model has been validated by customers and investors alike. A half petabyte of data processed demonstrates Qubole's growth and viability and we are very excited to raise the bar again as we continue to innovate on behalf of our users."

Based on Apache Hadoop and founded by the creators of Apache Hive and Facebook's analytics platform, Qubole Data Service is heavily optimized for the Cloud and is focused on making analytics easy and accessible to businesses of all sizes. The sophisticated data engine enables users to integrate and consolidate data from multiple sources " on premise and Cloud, structured and unstructured - and provide instant access through analytic tools like Tableau, Excel and R. In addition, the simplicity of Qubole's self-service user interface and the library of connectors to SQL sources (such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle), NoSQL sources (MongoDB), and MPP platforms (Vertica, Redshift) make it easy for analysts and data teams to combine, correlate, and create actionable insights from their data assets.

By using Qubole's platform, companies do not require a team of specialists to understand the complexity of putting together a Big Data stack. In-house analysts and data teams can focus on their algorithms and business logic, without worrying about operational complexities. Qubole's ease of use carries no compromise in performance, as in-house comparisons with Amazon Elastic MapReduce show that queries tested on a variety of text/json files run 5 times faster on average with Qubole Data Service.

Users can sign up for Qubole Data Service and begin running queries literally within minutes. Among Qubole's customers are a variety of companies in e-commerce, ad tech, web and mobile applications, and gaming verticals.

MediaMath, a leading global media buying platform, trusted their critical operations to Qubole to power complex analytics tasks. MediaMath analysts use Qubole to prepare data and use internally developed python libraries to create revenue attribution models. MediaMath has been an active user for over six months, and have successfully increased the complexity of their analytics offerings for their customers since deploying Qubole. Marc Rossen, team leader for Client Facing Analytics and Insights at MediaMath, relates, "We wanted a solution that our analysts could easily use and get started with quickly and did not have to worry about the operational management of such technical options. We wanted a solution where analysts could focus on their data and transformations without having to think about issues such as cluster sizes, Apache Hadoop versions, machine types and other elements of cluster operations."

YD World is a performance display advertising company for direct advertisers. Their proprietary Impulse platform delivers real time content, pricing, placement, and reporting, which requires sophisticated data processing architecture. YD World's Vice President of Technology and Development, Joris Spermon says, "We were in the middle of revisiting our data processing architecture when we came into contact with Qubole. Together, we succeeded in building an efficient and flexible ETL process for log processing and data harvesting requests. All without extensive costs and development. Qubole's fantastic support has been key in our successful deployment. They continue to deliver new features and revisit the ones that we ask for."

By bringing the simplicity of the Cloud to the power of Big Data, the expertise of Qubole's team has created many opportunities for companies of all sizes to leverage the tools previously only available to those with massive resources.

Qubole is busy building the next generation Cloud data platform under the belief that a new approach is needed " one that hides the complexity commonly associated with storing and managing data, and instead provides a fast, easy path to analysis and business insight.

Qubole's co-founders Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sen Sarma built and ran Facebook's data service and scaled it to over 25PB of data with hundreds of users and tens of thousands of queries every day. They also founded and authored Apache Hive, helped to build key parts of the Hadoop eco-system such as the Fair Scheduler and RCFile, and brought Apache HBase to Facebook.

Qubole has offices in Palo Alto and Bangalore.