GPU analytics company MapD Technologies today announced it has closed a $25 million Series B funding round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from existing investors NVIDIA, Vanedge Capital and Verizon Ventures. The financing comes amid a rapid increase in the adoption of ultrafast graphics processing units (GPUs) to power enterprise applications including machine learning, numerical computation and now data analytics.

Combining a powerful GPU-based SQL query engine with immersive visual analytics, the MapD software platform allows analysts and data scientists to interactively explore multi-billion-row data sets. With data volumes constantly increasing, extracting the full value of that data has become a significant challenge for many enterprises. MapD solves this problem by harnessing the massively parallel processing power of GPUs, providing insights orders of magnitude faster than CPU-based solutions.

The MapD platform is used by customers across the advertising, energy, financial services, government, retail, social media and telco sectors, united by their need for interactive analytics at scale.

"At NEA we strive to identify startups that are poised to capitalize on shifts in technology," said Greg Papadopoulos, PhD, venture partner at NEA. "GPU-powered analytics is going to radically change the data analytics market, and MapD has the technology and team to drive that disruption."

"MapD recognized early on that as companies become more data-centric and data sets grow ever larger, the underlying compute needs to shift to GPUs," said Jeff Herbst, vice president of business development at NVIDIA and head of NVIDIA GPU Ventures. "We've participated in every funding round with MapD, and expect them to emerge as a dominant force in the burgeoning field of GPU-powered analytics."

"We're seeing an emerging strong move towards GPUs for intense compute tasks," said Dan Vesset, group vice president of IDC's Analytics and Information Management market research and advisory practice. "The trend started with AI but is now extending to data analytics and other operational functions. MapD is at the leading edge of the transition to GPU-powered data analytics and visualization, which we see accelerating along with the exponential growth of the data universe."

"We knew the first time we met with MapD that they were onto something remarkable," said Moe Kermani, managing partner at Vanedge Capital. "Since then, MapD has established its leadership in the GPU-powered analytics market with amazing speed. Their mature product, advanced technology and strong relationships with cloud providers set them far ahead of the pack."

"We're very excited to partner with our incredible investors to accelerate the development of our technology and to increase customer adoption," said Todd Mostak, co-founder and CEO of MapD. "This investment will enable us to advance our vision of making GPU analytics a dominant technology in the enterprise."

Since announcing its Series A funding in March 2016, which included strategic investor In-Q-Tel, MapD has achieved several significant milestones:

Product Innovation: Continued rollout of new features, including the launch of version 2 of the MapD Core database and MapD Immerse visualization client in December 2016 with significantly greater SQL support and analytics capabilities.
Industry Recognition: Won Gartner's Cool Vendor Award for DBMS, Business Intelligence Group's Startup of the Year, CRN 10 Coolest Big Data Startups and Barclays Open Innovation Challenge.
Expanding Customer Base: Gained traction and expanded deployments with China State Grid, Simulmedia, Verizon and customers in the hedge fund, telematics, web infrastructure and US federal markets.
Broad Availability: AWS, Google, IBM SoftLayer and Microsoft Azure have all launched GPU cloud instances that make the MapD platform widely accessible and easy to deploy.
About MapD Technologies
MapD Technologies is a next-generation analytics company that harnesses the massive parallelism of modern graphics processing units (GPUs) to power lightning-fast SQL queries and visualization over large datasets. The MapD platform provides analysts and data scientists with the fastest time to insight, performance that is not possible with traditional CPU-based solutions.

Founded in 2013, MapD Technologies originated from research at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). MapD is funded by GV, In-Q-Tel, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), NVIDIA, Vanedge Capital and Verizon Ventures. The company is headquartered in San Francisco.