SQL-on-Hadoop Player Splice Machine Tops $15M Round Off With $3M More

Hadoop Relational Database Management System (RDMS) provider Splice Machine has topped off an earlier Series B funding round of $15 million with an additional $3 million. The addendum means a lot of interest on the part of investors in the company, as well as more equity to help out in a period of fast growth.

Correlation Ventures led the additional round. The Series B in February was led by Interwest Partners and Mohr Davidow Ventures.

Splice Machine is designed to scale real-time applications using commodity hardware without application rewrites. It replaces traditional RDBMS, such as Oracle and MySQL, that are experiencing scaling or cost issues. A transactional SQL on Hadoop RDBMS, Splice Machine helps customers power real-time Big Data analytics and applications.

“We provide what we call an affordable scale-out solution,” said Monte Zweben, co-founder and CEO of Splice Machine. “When databases hit the wall, take data off centralized infrastructure and spread across a cluster of commodity machines. We are a software company that is essentially deployed on premise or in the cloud.”

Zweben said that the original $15 million financing was a significant event, allowing the company to transition from development to commercial. “The funding has been going towards the sales force, marketing, consulting force in the field and making us a real enterprise software company.”

The company provides “the scalability of Hadoop and HBase, the ubiquity of SQL, and the transactional integrity of an RDBMS,” according to Zweben. “The most important trend is the fact that companies are now moving to scale out for powering real-time applications. Hadoop is not just a data science. "

Splice Machine is in fast growth mode. In 2012, the company tripled its staff and engaged with about 10 charter customers. Zweben said he expects the company to be around 60-70 strong by the end of the year (from about 35 staff members today).

“If there’s one thing that makes us radically different, it is that we provide a platform that is truly general-purpose and can power apps,” he said. “Most scale-out offerings are focused on data science and analytics. We provide a real-time concurrent platform for transactional applications for users hitting [an app] in real-time. Think of the last time you went shopping – the same time you were doing that, there were a thousand users doing similar things. In the background, inventory levels were changing. This needs to be kept consistent and in real time. We are the only ones on Hadoop that provide that.”