RapidMiner, Inc., the de-facto industry standard for predictive analytics built on an open stack, today announced it closed a $5 million Series A funding round, led by Earlybird Venture Capital and Open Ocean Capital, which is backed by the founders of MySQL. The company will use the capital to expand domestic and international sales and marketing operations in response to expanding demand for its RapidMiner product, and develop additional products in RapidMiner's enterprise-ready predictive analytics product line.

RapidMiner also announced it has completed a corporate and product rebranding with a new web site and renaming of its predictive analytics product line. The changes sharpen the company's identity and make it easier for customers to match RapidMiner products and services to specific enterprise needs. With 35,000 production deployments and 200,000 active users, RapidMiner offers highly scalable predictive analytics applications, including operational dashboards, metrics and performance reports in a single, easy to use platform that seamlessly integrates with popular enterprise data sources. By providing a wide variety of rich descriptive and predictive models to give customers the insight to make profitable decisions, RapidMiner has turned predictive analytics into one of the most effective strategies to accelerate business growth. The company's technology is in use by over 400 paying customers, including EADS, GfK, Lufthansa, PayPal, Pepsi, Sanofi, Siemens, Telenor, and Volkswagen.

'With Big Data being generated during every instance of consumer interaction, RapidMiner is well positioned to help customers quickly discover trends, correlations and opportunities from their data,' said Ingo Mierswa, co-founder and CEO of RapidMiner. 'The opportunity to bring in investors that have built successful and market leading companies played a big role in our decision making process, and I look forward to accelerating product innovations and revenue growth.'

'With three million product downloads, RapidMiner has rapidly become one of the leaders in the predictive analytics space,' said Monty Widenius, MySQL founder and Partner at Open Ocean Capital. 'We plan to leverage our experience in building MySQL, and the MySQL community, to help the RapidMiner team advance its technology and grow its user community around the world.'
'The breakout success of analytics platforms such as Tableau Software and Splunk underscores the massive demand for solutions that give businesses more control over the analytics process, and detailed insight into their operations,' said Usama Fayyad, RapidMiner board member and former Chief Data Officer at Yahoo! and Head of Data Mining at Microsoft. 'Unlike traditional, older predictive analytics solutions, RapidMiner allows users without any programming expertise to quickly analyze enterprise data and build predictive models that keep pace with the requirements of Big Data.'

'With sales having quintupled since 2011, RapidMiner has driven phenomenal growth due to its understanding of what deep insights business analysts really want to extract from their Big Data,' said Jason Whitmire, Partner at Earlybird Venture Capital. 'This funding will strengthen RapidMiner's position in the most important global markets and help the company build upon its lead in this fast-growing market.'

About Earlybird
Established in 1997 Earlybird currently manages over EUR650 million ($800 million) in assets. We have backed 100 companies, some of which have sparked significant innovations in business and technology and resulted in large scale ($1bn+) IPOs and trade sales. Earlybird backs European companies with global ambitions and our active portfolio currently includes 27 companies across the consumer Internet and enterprise services space. Further information is available at www.earlybird.com.

About Open Ocean
Open Ocean is a leading early-stage venture capital firm, focusing on disruptive European software start-ups utilizing user-base business models. Open Ocean leverages its direct experience as the founders of MySQL to provide hands-on support to the management of companies receiving Open Ocean's funding. Open Ocean Fund Three is supported by the European Union through the CIP Programme. For more information, visit us at www.openoceancapital.com

About RapidMiner
Pioneering advanced analytics vendor RapidMiner is redefining how business analysts use Big Data to predict the future. With an open source heritage, RapidMiner is one of today's most widely known and used predictive analytics platforms, providing powerful solutions for a wide variety of industries. For more information, visit www.rapidminer.com.