Hortonworks, a US-based vendor of big data platform for Apache Hadoop, has secured $100m in funding in a round that included internet company Yahoo.
The round was co-led by asset management firm BlackRock and investment firm Passport Capital, and featured all the company’s existing investors, including Yahoo, Dragoneer Investment Group, Tenaya Capital, Benchmark and Index Ventures.
Hortonworks originally spun off from Yahoo in 2011, at which time Yahoo and Benchmark invested a combined $23m. The two invested in the $25m round led by Index later in 2011 and a $50m round led by Tenaya and Dragoneer in June 2013. The company has now raised about $198m.
The funding will be used by Hortonworks to continue to expand the ecosystem through which it distributes Hadoop, as well as in the expansion of its global operations. It claims to developer and distribute the only 100% open source Apache Hadoop data platform.
“Through our unrelenting focus on innovating completely in the open, and deeply integrating with existing data center systems, we have seen phenomenal growth in our business over the past 24 months,” said Rob Bearden, CEO of Hortonworks. “We will continue to deliver on the promise of a completely open platform and further cement Hortonworks as the unquestioned Hadoop leader in the IT ecosystem.”
News of the investment follows a $160m round recently announced by another Hadoop specialist, Cloudera, and is a sign of how thoroughly Hadoop is beginning to penetrate the business market.