Pepperdata Raises $5M in Funding

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., April 29 — Pepperdata, 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.”