SlamData Inc., commercial developer of the SlamData open source project, today announced the company has raised a significant seed funding round led by True Ventures. The financing will be used to enhance the visual analytics and Enterprise capabilities of the project as well as expand the business team.
The Boulder-based company launched an early version of the SlamData open source project in November 2014 supporting MongoDB. Since January, the project has seen more than 300% growth in users, reaching thousands of companies including many Fortune 500s. Companies are flocking to the project because it is the only solution to bring native analytics to NoSQL data sources.
SlamData provides a novel analytics solution designed natively for modern data. Modern databases like MongoDB support so-called NoSQL data models, which allow nesting, denormalization, and heterogeneity. SlamData's technology, which is built on a formal generalization of 40-year old relational algebra called MRA ('Murray'), allows effortless exploration, manipulation, and analysis of NoSQL data, without the need to relocate or transform the data in any way.
Legacy visual analytics solutions like Tableau cannot connect to modern NoSQL databases or make sense of NoSQL data, requiring cumbersome, brittle, and complex Extract, Transform, and load (ETL) processes to transform the data to fit the traditional relational mold. Fueled by the rapid growth of web, mobile, and Internet of Things (IoT), companies are adopting NoSQL databases faster than ever before, and they are looking for next-generation analytics solutions that can natively understand NoSQL data.
SlamData's high-level interface allows non-developers to perform visual data exploration and visual analytics on data stored in NoSQL databases. A cloud-ready solution, the interface runs in all major browsers, tablets, and smartphones, without the need to install any software, and the solution can be deployed on private or public clouds. A separate REST API, licensed under Apache 2, provides programmatic access to the NoSQL analytics engine, which can be leveraged from within applications for embedding analytics and reporting use cases.
According to SlamData CEO Jeff Carr, a veteran entrepreneur who has spent years working in the analytics space, 'Tableau reimagined analytics for the relational data world, and Splunk did it for unstructured data. We're following in the footsteps of these great companies by doing the same for the semi-structured world of NoSQL data.'
Puneet Agarwal, Partner at True Ventures, had this to say on the deal: 'We believe that the ecosystem around NoSQL will eventually rival or surpass the ecosystem around RDBMS. SlamData is tackling the NoSQL analytics problem head-on with some truly groundbreaking technology. We are amazed by SlamData's early user response, and we look forward to being a key partner for the next phase of the company's growth.'
The company's patent-pending technology, invented by SlamData CTO John A. De Goes, is based on a mathematical generalization of relational algebra, which allows slicing, dicing, and aggregation of deeply nested, heterogeneous data of the type often stored in NoSQL data stores. De Goes, a mathematician turned computer scientist and well-known expert in big data analytics, started the open source project more than a year ago after recognizing the need for a richer, more powerful query calculus for post-relational data.
'Relational algebra doesn't understand modern NoSQL data,' says De Goes. 'What we need is not more ways to turn NoSQL data into relational data, but richer ways of describing analytics on NoSQL data. MRA is the new standard of analytics for the post-relational era, and the engine behind our visual analytics for NoSQL.'
About True Ventures
Founded in 2005, True Ventures is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology startups. With four funds and approximately $900 million in capital under management, True provides seed and Series A funding to the most talented entrepreneurs in today's fastest growing markets. With a mission to make the world a better place for entrepreneurs, True encourages each founder's vision and has built resources to empower the employees, families and communities of its portfolio companies. The firm maintains a strong founder community and offers innovative educational opportunities to its portfolio, helping entrepreneurs achieve higher levels of success and impact. With more than 150 companies funded and multiple companies acquired, the current True portfolio has helped create over 3,500 jobs.
About SlamData
SlamData is the developer of the SlamData open source project, the industry-leading solution for visual analytics over NoSQL data. The cloud-deployable software allows users to visually explore, refine, and visualize data stored in NoSQL databases, without data relocation, ETL or developer resources. SlamData's mission is to make it easy for non-technical users to see and understand NoSQL data. Currently, SlamData supports the MongoDB NoSQL database, with Spark, ElasticSearch, Cassandra, and other data sources currently in development.