Infoworks raises $5M in Series A funding led by Nexus Venture Partners, expands team
Automated big data management Infoworks secured USD 5 million in Series A funding led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Knoll Ventures and other investors. With this funding, the company has expanded its management, bringing onboard veterans in analytics and enterprise software. Ramesh Menon, Head of product management, and Jitender Nankani, Head of customer success, are recent additions to the management team.
Ramesh most recently led product management at YarcData and previously directed market strategy for Informatica’s Master Data Management business unit. Jitender was a principal at Saama and has delivered numerous big data solutions for Fortune 500 companies.
“Existing methodologies and systems for data management are proving to be too slow, inflexible, and expensive to meet the emerging needs of data-driven enterprises,” says Amar Arsikere, CEO and Co-founder of Infoworks.
He explains that just as Google crawls the web and organizes information for search, the Infoworks DDW platform automatically crawls enterprise databases, ingests the data into Hadoop, and organizes it into high performance data warehouses and other data models that support all enterprise use cases, including cubes.
“The strong positive response of large enterprises to the technology developed by Infoworks was impressive - amongst the strongest I have seen in over 20 years of working with technology startups, and a clear indication of the market need,” adds Buno Pati, Chairman and Co-founder of Infoworks.
On investment, Naren Gupta, Managing Partner of Nexus Venture Partners, says, “Infoworks addresses a pressing industry need for building data warehouses and data models for rapidly changing big data. We were very impressed with the company’s vision and are excited to be part of the team.” Naren is now on the board of directors of Infoworks.
Nexus Venture Partners has invested in a variety of companies. Nexus portfolio companies include Snapdeal, Cloud.com, Gluster, Pubmatic, DimDim, helpshift, 0xdata, Elastic Box, cNetmagic, Druva, and Unmetric.
Founded in 2014, Infoworks developed a dynamic data warehousing (DDW) platform on Hadoop. The InfoWorks DDW platform provides a high-performance, scalable, and shared data repository that supports all enterprise analytics on Hadoop through software automation and intelligent data organization.
Yourstory’s take
According to Nasscom and CRISIL Global Research and Analytics 2014 report, from USD 5.3 billion in 2011, the global Big Data market will touch $25 billion by 2015. According to Nasscom and Blueocean Market Intelligence, the Indian analytics market will cross the $2 billion mark by fiscal 2018.
From finding hidden patterns, trends to help them better tailor their products and services to customers to improve performance, companies have started using big data in the country.
Although at a nascent stage, companies are using analytics for driving growth, reducing cost, improving operational excellence, recruiting better people, and deciding various business strategies.
Not just companies, but political parties have also started fancying it. Remember the 2014 elections in the country? Political parties took the route of analytics to understand the voters demographic. Political parties and government are new entrants in the segment.
However, according to experts, there are big challenges in the segment for both companies and vendors. The former lacks understanding such as what data to collect, and how to integrate it with the latter.