U.S.-Ukrainian big data startup Galactic Exchange raises $1.25 million

Galactic Exchange, a Silicon Valley-headquartered big data startup with engineering teams split between Kharkiv (Kharkov), Eastern Ukraine and Menlo Park, California has raised $1.25 million from Floodgate and Signia Venture Partners. The deal, which closed in early August, has just been announced publicly.

The two California-based VC firms had already backed the startup in its seed funding round one year ago, Galactic Exchange’s cofounder Konstantin Kladko told Ukraine Digital News.

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After an important research effort in the field of big data, Galactic Exchange has developed a container-virtualized cluster compute platform called ClusterGX. This software is intended to let businesses use big data in the simplest, fastest and cheapest possible way. ClusterGX allows companies to “create a Hadoop/Spark cluster in five minutes with zero required big data, container or clustering experience.”

“We are excited to be an early investor in Galactic Exchange,” said Rick Thompson, a founding partner at Signia who has joined the board of Galactic Exchange. “They have built a powerful platform that will transform the legacy expectations regarding the skill-set hurdles that have to be overcome to make a big data roll-out successful.”

“We love working with teams that disrupt the status quo, and Galactic is going to do just that,” the investor added.

The ClusterGX product line will be available for general download at the end of September to coincide with the O’Reilly Strata+Hadoop World event in New York.

Born in Kharkiv, Kladko moved to Silicon Valley in 1998. “I was a physicist at Los Alamos National Lab and then Stanford University. At Stanford, I was working with Bob Laughlin, who was 1998 Nobel Prize Winner in Physics,” he recalled.

Kladko also founded Wi-Fi software provider Сloudessa, which was sold to U.K. operator Global Reach, according to the Ukrainian media.

Another cofounder of Galactic Exchange is Robert Mustarde, a serial startup entrepreneur who moved from the U.K. to Silicon Valley in 2006. Mustarde was an investor in Galactic Exchange’s first seed round. He joined the startup as full-time CEO after the product prototype was developed, Kladko told Ukraine Digital News.