Galactic Exchange today announced the closing of its seed financing round and also confirmed that the pre-release (beta) version of its flagship ClusterGX product line would be available for general download at the end of September, to coincide with the O'Reilly Strata+Hadoop World event in New York.

California based Galactic Exchange has been developing technology to hugely simplify the deployment of Hadoop/Spark based infrastructures and associated analytics applications, both on-premise and in the cloud.

'The open source software ecosystem surrounding Big Data is an impenetrable soup of complexity for most and so not surprisingly market forecasts show that services continue to demand the biggest percentage of all dollars spent,' said Rob Mustarde, President & CEO of Galactic Exchange. 'The enormous benefit that Big Data promises is closed to all but those with the most skilled and experienced IT staff, or those willing to pay large for outside help -- our vision is to change that.'

ClusterGX Community Edition will be free to download from the Galactic Exchange web site and will enable an organization to spin up Container virtualized Hadoop/Spark clusters in a matter of minutes with zero experience required.

'There is an old adage often applied to beneficial but difficult tasks,' continued Mustarde. 'If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. We want to help make it easy and cost-effective so that everyone can do it -- they can have a Big Data strategy. Maybe they can implement this on their own, maybe they still need a little help or maybe they still need a lot of help -- but we believe our technology will facilitate everyone to aspire to a Big Data strategy that they would never have thought possible before they laid hands on ClusterGX.'

As well as the free Community Edition, Galactic Exchange will also offer an Enterprise Edition of ClusterGX with added functionality and support services. In addition, ClusterGX Full-Service will provide professional services to assist in on-premise or in-cloud deployments and implementation of a client's big data strategy.

Seed Financing
Galactic Exchange also announced today that it had closed its seed round of financing with two Silicon Valley based venture capital firms -- Signia Venture Partners and Floodgate. Both Signia and Floodgate are focused on backing early stage technology companies. Rick Thompson, a founding Partner at Signia, also joins the board of Galactic Exchange.

'We are excited to be an early investor in Galactic Exchange,' said Thompson. 'They have built a powerful platform that will transform the legacy expectations regarding the skill-set hurdles that have to be overcome to make a big data roll-out successful -- we love working with teams that disrupt the status quo and Galactic is going to do just that.'

Galactic Exchange will be demonstrating ClusterGX at Strata+Hadoop World at the Javits Center in New York (September 26th-29th). Please come and see us at booth P14 in the Innovators Pavilion.

About Galactic Exchange:
Galactic Exchange, Inc. develops software to enable the industry's easiest and fastest possible deployment and management of powerful container-enabled compute clusters for Big Data. The ClusterGX platform can be deployed in minutes with zero required big data or clustering experience. Pre-release software can be downloaded for free from the Galactic Exchange web site by registering at www.galacticexchange.io.

About Signia Venture Partners:
Signia Venture Partners is an early-stage venture fund dedicated to helping passionate entrepreneurs build impactful world-changing companies. Their goal is to be the most helpful investor an entrepreneur will ever have. Sample investments include Pepperdata, BlueTalon, Boxed, Scoop and Alibaba.com.

About Floodgate:
FLOODGATE backs the most important digital businesses of the future, often before traditional VCs are ready to invest. They have invested in some of the most meaningful companies in business technology and consumer technology, with a combined market value exceeding $30 Billion. Sample investments include Twitter, Lyft, Okta, Spiceworks and Solarwinds.