Hadoop: On Time, Every Time

Why @SigniaVC invested in Pepperdata

Ed Cluss
The Signia Collection

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We were first introduced to Sean Suchter, Pepperdata CEO and co-founder, by a trusted advisor in our network, Vish Makhijani (Udacity/Zynga). As we then learned, Chad Carson is the other Pepperdata co-founder. His wife Heidi had worked in previous companies, Flycast and Adify, that my partner, Rick Thompson, had founded, and also at Wild Needle, where we had invested. So, Chad has been known to us as a database and big data expert since 1996. Sean and Chad co-founded Pepperdata after working together at companies such as Inktomi and Yahoo. They were well connected in the Hadoop community with relevant early work pioneering the use of Hadoop. We found ourselves really liking both of these guys as they intrigued us with their plans for enhancing Hadoop. You can read more about how it all got started in a great post from Sean/Chad here.

Signia focuses on mobility, data, and disruptive technology. Think companies in our portfolio like Nativo (native mobile advertising), Kurbo (childhood obesity), and MomentFeed (social and mobile marketing for physical stores). We have been tracking the progress of Hadoop and believe the transition from proprietary and expensive high-end hardware to clusters of commodity servers powered by Hadoop, is inevitable. Pepperdata had the right team and focus, so we enthusiastically joined the seed round of investors in late 2012.

We all became encouraged by early technical proof coming out of beta trials with prominent Silicon Valley technology companies during 2013. This was accomplished with a very small technical team and only one employee (outside of the two founders) performing any business development. Customer interest seemed to be less the gating issue than the pace of identifying great engineers to build their product faster. We all agreed 2014 should increase focus on building the company’s sales team and process as we continued to add product capabilities.

While the company had only consumed a fraction of the original seed capital it raised, Sean and Chad were receptive to taking on additional capital to fund the company for faster growth during 2014. We really liked the product Pepperdata had developed and spoke with the early beta customers directly to confirm their satisfaction. Our team at Signia led the new Series A financing announced yesterday and I formally joined the board.

The buzz about Pepperdata is spreading virally across the development community. My enthusiasm for the freedom to use Hadoop that Pepperdata brings to the Hadoop community continues to grow and I look forward to a long partnership with Sean and Chad.

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