Pepperdata (www.pepperdata.com), a software company that delivers predictability, capacity, and visibility for Hadoop, announced today it has raised $5M in Series A financing led by Signia Venture Partners and Webb Investment Network. The company's investors also include Jerry Yang, founding partner of AME Cloud Ventures and cofounder of Yahoo; Ed Zander, former CEO and Chairman of Motorola; and Andy Ludwick, Pepperdata board member and founding CEO of Bay Networks.

Pepperdata was founded by former Yahoo and Microsoft executives Sean Suchter and Chad Carson, who bring real-world experience as the first users of large commercial Hadoop clusters at Yahoo, and then used large-scale, high-velocity data at Microsoft to join social data from Facebook and Twitter with Bing web search.

The company will use the new funding to accelerate investments in product development and further build out the company's sales and marketing organization. Pepperdata software is already helping a number of customers, including some of the world's largest internet and software-as-a-service companies, optimize large-scale Hadoop clusters with over a thousand nodes.

While Hadoop holds promise as a unified data platform across an enterprise, it presents a key limitation: A single job can instantaneously monopolize a cluster and slow high-priority jobs to a crawl. With Pepperdata's software, customers are able to run multiple applications on one cluster, achieving more efficient capacity utilization, predictability, and quality of service for their Hadoop infrastructure.

'We operate in a world where thousand-node Hadoop clusters are rapidly becoming commonplace,' said Sean Suchter, cofounder and CEO, Pepperdata. 'We want to make running multiple big data applications on a single cluster as easy as running multiple applications on your laptop. This funding will allow us to continue enhancing the solution, expand our sales team, and deliver even more value to existing and future customers.'

Pepperdata plans to more than double the size of its team over the next 12 months. In the short-term, the company will begin to share more about its solution and the challenges the company is solving through its blog.

'Sean and Chad have built a world-class technical team who understand the challenges with Hadoop better than anyone -- they were the first ones to run a business on it,' said Ed Cluss, Partner at Signia Ventures and Board Member at Pepperdata. 'Technology that solves the challenges of running Hadoop in the enterprise will be critical to the future of big data. Pepperdata is uniquely positioned to provide a much-needed solution that brings increased visibility, capacity planning and control to Hadoop.'

About Pepperdata
Pepperdata delivers predictability, increasing performance, and visibility for business-critical Hadoop jobs on existing clusters running multiple applications. Pepperdata's software makes every Hadoop node more efficient, allowing companies to run more jobs on the existing infrastructure. Pepperdata was founded in 2012 by Sean Suchter and Chad Carson, former Yahoo executives whose groups were the first two users of Hadoop in production even before it was called Hadoop. More @pepperdata or http://www.pepperdata.com.

About Signia Venture Partners
Signia Venture Partners is a unique early-stage venture fund dedicated to helping passionate entrepreneurs build the best new impactful and high-growth companies. Signia operates as co-founders and investors in five key areas: mobility, enterprise, education, e-commerce, and data and in new disruptive technologies, such as quantified and augmented self. Our team is made up of proven entrepreneurs with a track record of success and experience at every stage of growth and with a hands-on approach to technology investing. More @signiavc or http://www.signia.vc.

About Webb Investment Network
Webb Investment Network (WIN) is the seed/early-stage investment vehicle of Maynard Webb (former eBay COO, Salesforce board member, Yahoo! Chairman, Visa board member). WIN's goal is to invest in transformational technology companies across enterprise and cloud applications, mobile, marketplaces, and payments. WIN is also able to leverage an 80+ member Affiliate Network, comprised of seasoned technology operating executives who provide on-demand advice and mentorship to the WIN portfolio. To learn more, please visit winfunding.com.