Big Data Fund Partnering With Thought Leaders
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To effectively support Big Data
entrepreneurs and foster community, the Big Data Fund is partnering with
thought leaders throughout the industry to help drive innovation, including
data scientists, software entrepreneurs/technologists and academic researchers.
Along these lines, Accel Partners is organizing a Big Data Conference in
Silicon Valley to occur in spring 2012. The Accel Big Data Fund is aligned with
Cloudera to give Fund-backed companies access to Cloudera's industry and
customer insights, as well as advice on developing applications on the Apache
Hadoop platform.
Accel will also collaborate closely
with pioneering entrepreneurs and technologists in Big Data, who will lend
their expertise as formal fund advisers. The advisors are Hadoop creator
Doug Cutting; Gil Ebaz, founder and CEO of Factual; Jeff Hammerbacher, chief
scientist at Cloudera; Jeff Heer, assistant professor of computer science at
Stanford University; Hilary Mason, chief scientist at bit.ly; Jay Parikh,
director of engineering at Facebook; and Kenny Van Zant, a member of the
technical staff at Asana.
"The challenges facing enterprises
as they struggle to capture, understand and use Big Data are enormous,"
Olson said in a statement. "The kind of high-speed innovation that can
help meet those challenges demands the attention of smart, driven entrepreneurs
with the resources they need to turn great ideas into products and services. We
wholeheartedly support Accel Partners' commitment to providing the money,
advice and relationships that can make that happen. We believe that the open-source
Apache Hadoop community has built exactly the right platform to launch the next
generation of great companies solving real business and social problems."
"Accel has laid a solid foundation
for Big Data companies to get off the ground, including Couchbase, by providing
crucial resources and taking an active role in operations, strategy,
partnerships and recruiting," said Bob Wiederhold, president and CEO of
Couchbase, in a statement. "With Accel's guidance and support, Couchbase
has grown from a small open-source startup to the leading provider of NoSQL
database technology, powering some of the world's largest Web applications, and
thousands of others."
Meanwhile, in its Nov. 7 news, Cloudera
announced the close a $40 million Series D funding round led by Frank Artale of
Ignition Partners and joined by existing investors Accel Partners, Greylock
Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and In-Q-Tel. To support aggressive growth
and increased momentum in the marketplace, Cloudera will use the funds to
further expand its marketing and sales operations, and support key strategic
initiatives, the company said.
