Kinetica Adds $6 Million in Acceleration Funding and Expands Management Team
Kinetica, provider of the fastest, in-memory database accelerated by GPUs, today announced it added $6 million in acceleration financing. Funds raised total $13 million¬, which is fueling the company’s entry into the commercial space after 6 years of development and selling to the government sector. Ray Lane, Managing Partner of GreatPoint Ventures and former Oracle President and Managing Partner of KPCB, is the company’s primary backer who funded $7 million in April 2016. Kinetica also expanded its management team, bringing top talent from big data leaders Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR and Platfora to drive growth.
Kinetica, formerly GPUdb, was built from the ground up initially for the US Army Intelligence and Security Command to track terrorist and other national security threats in real time, producing instant results while visualizing insights across more than 200 sources of streaming datasets. With the growth of data from IoT, transactions and other sources, business users are running up against similar computational bottlenecks amidst the challenge of streaming and analyzing data in truly real time.
“As data, and especially streaming data, continues to grow, Kinetica’s database is the fastest solution, able to process it all in real time and do so at scale,” said Ray Lane, managing partner at GreatPoint Ventures and strategic advisor for KPCB. “The combination of GPU acceleration, linear scalability and easy integration makes Kinetica the ideal solution for organizations needing to make critical decisions instantaneously based on the influx of its data.”
“Kinetica is already battle-tested through deployments with federal and commercial customers, including the United States Postal Service. We have strong partnerships with NVIDIA for accelerated hardware, and are certified on IBM, HP, Dell and Cisco servers,” said Amit Vij, CEO, Kinetica. “The new funding will be used to fuel product development, marketing and sales growth. New top talent in the areas of operations, sales, marketing, engineering and services has been added to provide the needed infrastructure to support worldwide operations.”
Further evidence of the value its product delivers to customers, earlier this year Kinetica received its second High Performance Computing Innovation Excellence Award from IDC for its innovation on behalf of the United States Postal Service.
New Executive Appointments
Kinetica recently added executive talent in operations, sales, marketing, engineering, and services. These appointments include:
- Marcus Holm, vice president of global field operations. In this role, Marcus leads the sales, business development, services and support teams. Prior to Kinetica, Marcus oversaw the western US region for Cloudera. Before transitioning into the big data space, Marcus spent several years at Cisco Systems in both the US and APAC, where he focused on Cisco’s Intelligent Automation Solutions, a comprehensive cloud management and data center automation platform.
- Michele Nemschoff, vice president of marketing. Michele heads up the marketing team, having joined Kinetica after her most recent role as vice president of corporate marketing at MapR. Previously, she led the marketing team at PARC, a Xerox company.
- Steve Kwong, vice president of finance and sales operations. Steve was previously senior director for sales operations at Cloudera and was also the senior director for sales operations at Yodlee.
- Eric Mizell, vice president of global solution engineering. Eric joins Kinetica from Hortonworks where he was director of solution engineering.
- Mike Perez, vice president of services. Mike leads the solution architecture and delivery teams as well as worldwide support. He was previously at Hortonworks, where he was both a regional director, consulting and a principal architect, emerging products. Prior to that, he was a technical account manager at Cloudera.
- Charles Sutton, managing director of Europe. Prior to Kinetica, Charles was the managing director of Europe for Platfora, and prior to that he was sales director for Cloudera.
Kinetica recently moved its headquarters to San Francisco, CA, while still maintaining offices in Arlington, VA.
About Kinetica
Kinetica addresses today’s data paradigm by bringing Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to the datacenter. Built from the ground up to scale linearly, Kinetica’s distributed, in-memory database accelerated by GPUs delivers truly real-time actionable intelligence on large, complex and streaming data sets: 100x faster performance at 1/10 of the hardware of traditional databases. Kinetica makes real time a reality. Organizations use Kinetica to simultaneously ingest, explore, analyze and visualize streaming data within milliseconds to make critical decisions and find efficiencies, lower cost, generate new revenue, and improve customer experience. Learn more at kinetica.com.