sqrrl, the company focused on security, scalability, and adaptability for Big Data, today announced that it has received funding from Atlas Venture and Matrix Partners. Chris Lynch of Atlas and Antonio Rodriguez of Matrix will join the company's board of directors. sqrrl's seed round will enable the company to aggressively hire to meet the rising demand for secure, scalable, and adaptable Big Data products and fuel the release of an enterprise version of Apache Accumulo that extends the core technology.

"The sqrrl team is an awesome group of people that knows Big Data and knows security," said Chris Lynch, partner at Atlas Venture. "Their impressive experience, technical strength, and the maturity of Accumulo will help solve a number of core problems in the Big Data ecosystem. I am excited to introduce them to the vibrant Massachusetts Big Data community as my first venture capital investment."

"Everyone wants to bring all of their data together to drive key insights, but because of security, privacy, legal, policy, regulatory, and/or compliance constraints this simply hasn't been possible," explains Oren J. Falkowitz, co-founder and CEO of sqrrl. "sqrrl frees users to fully utilize all of the data available to them. By enabling companies to access and make sense of data at massive scale extremely quickly, data can now really drive decisions."

sqrrl's products are focused on Apache Accumulo, a distributed key/value store based on Google's Big Table design, which has three unique technical advantages:

--Security: Fine-grained security controls allow organizations to control data at the cell-level and promote a data-centric security model.
--Scalability: Accumulo is proven to operate and perform at massive scale.
--Adaptability: sqrrl's solutions enable users to move beyond batch processing and conduct a wide variety of analyses, including information retrieval, statistical, graph, and visualizations across diverse data environments.

sqrrl's core engineering team members architected and developed Apache Accumulo within the National Security Agency (NSA) and have focused on extending it ever since its release at the end of 2011 as an open source project within the Apache Software Foundation. sqrrl is the next logical step.

By introducing cell-level access controls to the enterprise, sqrrl helps anyone looking to develop secure information exchanges. This extremely granular yet flexible way of storing data is particularly useful for those in highly-regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services, where partners may need access but who may not have rights to view all patient or customer information.

"80% of Fortune 500 companies are currently experimenting with solutions that don't scale, are insecure, and bring 20 year-old ways to access and manipulate data to middling data sets. If we are going to deliver on the promise of the BIG in Big Data, we need a better alternative," said Antonio Rodriguez, general partner at Matrix Partners, "What better foundation is there than a battle-tested piece of technology that has been used to reach petabytes of scale inside the government for years? Only Google can scale to this level."

"sqrrl enables enterprises to engage all of their data at scale," said John Frank, principal at Computable Insights and advisor to sqrrl. "I am impressed with this team's technical vision for leveraging Accumulo's unique capabilities to extract insights from massive data, including large graphs and unstructured data across security domains."

To learn more about sqrrl, visit www.sqrrl.com. For additional perspective on sqrrl, please read Antonio's and Chris' blog posts.

About sqrrl
sqrrl is a Big Data company headquartered in Cambridge, MA that provides software and services for Apache Accumulo. sqrrl leverages its understanding of security and Big Data technologies to enable companies to unlock the potential of Big Data.

About Atlas Venture
Atlas Venture is an early-stage venture capital firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that invests in technology and life sciences innovation. For more information, visit www.atlasventure.com.

About Matrix Partners
Matrix Partners is a premier venture capital firm that has generated outstanding returns for more than three decades. By focusing on early-stage investments and emphasizing long-term relationships with entrepreneurs, the firm has delivered several of the industry's top performing funds of all time. Matrix Partners has offices in Cambridge and Waltham, MA; New York, NY; Palo Alto, CA; Mumbai, India; and Beijing and Shanghai, China. Matrix Partners has invested in several game-changing, industry-leading businesses such as Apple Computer, Gilt Groupe, JBoss, Netezza, Phone.com, Polyvore, Starent Networks, Sycamore Networks, Veritas, Zendesk, and Zong.