MapR grabs $110M in funding and debt to play harder in the Hadoop game

The Hadoop wars haven’t actually narrowed to just two companies, Cloudera and Hortonworks.

MapR, a company that adds its own proprietary code to the Hadoop open-source software, said today that it has raised $110 million in new money — $80 million in equity, $30 million in debt.

Cloudera and Hortonworks have brought in big funding rounds in the past few months, and some commentators in enterprise technology and big data circles have muttered lately about MapR’s relative lack of visibility. But MapR has been doing just fine from the perspective of co-founder and chief executive John Schroeder.

“Our value proposition is really strong with companies that have serious applications to run in production,” Schroeder told VentureBeat in an interview. More than 500 customers pay for MapR software licenses, including Ancestry.com, Beats Music, the Climate Corp., ComScore, and Samsung, he said.

And MapR has been growing. Bookings tripled year over year in the first quarter of this year, the company claimed last month.

With the new money, Schroeder’s company can now challenge its competitors more aggressively. And it’s a much-needed infusion for MapR.

“MapR has been a bit under the radar compared to Cloudera and Hortonworks, but they have an extremely strong solution and large-scale customers. This round of funding will help them get their message out,” Mike Gualtieri, a Forrester analyst covering big data, told VentureBeat via email. “This substantial round of financing led by Google says a lot about the nascent Hadoop market. There is no de-facto commercial distro. The heat is on, and it is getting hotter.”

Like other Hadoop vendors, MapR sees almost all of its customers deploying its software in on-premises data centers, not public clouds. But cloud usage of Hadoop clusters should go up in the years to come, Schroeder said. And as that happens, MapR should be well positioned. The company’s software runs on CenturyLink’s cloud, the growing Google Compute Engine, and top public cloud Amazon Web Services.

Schroeder boasted of enterprise-focused features in his company’s Hadoop distribution, including 99.999 percent high availability for certain editions of the software.

And it’s not all proprietary code.

“We include more open source in our distro than anybody,” Schroder said.

Google Capital and Qualcomm Ventures led the new equity round in MapR. Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, NEA, and Redpoint Ventures also participated. Silicon Valley Bank led the debt financing.

MapR started in 2009 and is based in San Jose, Calif. To date it has raised $174 million. Around 250 people work for the company, Schroeder said.

The company could go public as soon as the second half of next year, he said.