Arcadia Data takes $11.5M to sell a business-intelligence tool for Hadoop

Startup Arcadia Data is today coming out of stealth mode and revealing its business-intelligence application for analyzing data sitting inside the Hadoop open-source software, which can hold lots of different kinds of data. The startup is also announcing today that it has taken on a $11.5 million funding round.

People can now download Arcadia’s software for Mac and Windows for free. An enterprise version with advanced analytics, security features, and higher performance will ship by the end of the year.

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Companies can choose from a wide variety of business-intelligence tools to ask questions of their data, but not many of these tools run queries on Hadoop through open-source SQL querying engines like Hive and Impala and can therefore work with the largest and most complex data sets. This is where Arcadia is looking to make inroads.

As Priyank Patel, a cofounder of Arcadia Data and its head of product, walked me through a demo of the software, he pointed out that it was doing far more than charting out a little spreadsheet. It was summarizing, visualizing, and mapping out data from 180 million records. This was not something, he said, that one could do with a BI tool like Tableau or Qlik out of the box.

“You are going to push the limits of scale,” Patel told me, speaking of generic BI tools. “You’re going to find very quickly the tool is going to put some limits on how much data fits in.”

Other venture-backed BI startups, like Platfora and Clearstory Data, target Hadoop. And many BI tools have Hadoop connectors. Nevertheless, Arcadia, whose founders come from Aster Data (later acquired by Teradata) has been funded.

Arcadia has formed partnerships with Hadoop vendors Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM, and MapR. While it’s designed for data in Hadoop, Arcadia’s tool does allow you to visualize data from an Oracle or MySQL database or even a spreadsheet.

Mayfield Fund led the new round in the startup. Blumberg Capital and Intel Capital also participated. Patel declined to say how much money Arcadia Data has raised in total.

Arcadia Data started in 2013 and is based in San Mateo, California. The startup has seven customers, including Appboy, HP, and MarketShare.