Data company Terascala has said that Intel has made an investment in the Massachusetts-based firm as part of the $14m series B round announced in April this year. Early-stage venture firm Ascent Venture Partners also participated.
The investment was made through Intel’s corporate venturing unit Intel Capital, which invested $526m over 158 investments in 2011.
Terascala has now raised a total $20.2m in venture funding. AVP invested $3m in its series A back in 2007. Since then, the firm has held a succession of smaller venture rounds from undisclosed investors. In December 2009, it raised $575k, and then $150k and $2m in the following January and February, respectively. Then in January 2011, it raised a further $500k.
The new round of financing will be used to fund growth in Terascala’s R&D department, as well as bolstering sales and marketing.
“With Big Data and compute capacity both growing at exponential rates, the important problem to solve is how to get the two together more rapidly,” said investment director of Intel Capital John Mascarenas. “Conventional data delivery technology is not fast enough, but this problem can be solved with a parallel file system delivering data to and from applications running on Intel’s latest family of Xeon processors. Together with our recent acquisition of Whamcloud, we are committed to making Big Data actionable for enterprises.”
“This investment will help us gain better market traction with major system vendors, including Dell, EMC, and NetApp,” said Steve Butler, CEO of Terascala. “Our goal is to make high performance storage solutions enterprise-ready—optimized for performance and capacity, easy to set up and use, and with toolsets to manage data workflow within an existing IT infrastructure.”