South Korea-based conglomerate Samsung has made a strategic investment in Cloudant, a US-based database-as-a-service provider.
Samsung Venture Investment Corporation (SVIC) provided an undisclosed amount to be used to advance research and development to further improve global data distribution technologies and mobile application data management.
Hyuk-Jeen Suh, senior investment manager with Samsung Ventures America, SVIC’s US subsidiary, said: “A globally distributed data layer and management of that data is especially critical for large enterprise businesses.
“We felt that this is the right time to strategically invest in Cloudant to support the company’s vision to manage the proliferation of data to be created by, for example, mobile devices, machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies, and the ‘internet of things’ in the future.”
In October 2012, In-Q-Tel, the quasi-corporate venturing unit of the Central Intelligence Agency, made an investment in 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.