In-Q-Tel, the quasi-corporate venturing unit of the Central Intelligence Agency, has made an investment in the web-based data storage service, Cloudant.
Cloudant was conceived at MIT in 2008 by Alan Hoffman (President), Adam Kocoloski (CTO) and Michael Miller (Chief Scientist).
Since then, the total capital raised comes to more than $3m thanks to a $1m Series A investment by the California-based Y Combinator incubator in December 2008 which was followed a $2m instalment three years later including Avalon Ventures.
The two companies have joined forces in a strategic partnership to pool skills in solving ‘the big data problem’ – knowledge of which was gained through large-scale analysis of experiments like the Large Hadron Collider. The service is based on the Apache CouchDB cloud database primarily used by web developers.
The Boston-based company with 18 employees faces competition from rivals in the NoSQL sector like MongoDB and Cassandra.
IQT recently took a $10m stake in Pelican Imaging which is developing new-age cameras for the smartphone market. Other investors in the California-based photographic specialist include; Globespan Capital Partners, Granite Ventures and InterWest Partners.