MAPD LAUNCHES LIGHTNING FAST GPU DATABASE AND VISUAL ANALYTICS PLATFORM; LANDS $10M SERIES A FUNDING

March 30, 2016 - San Francisco, CA; MapD Technologies today unveiled its GPU-powered database and visual analytics software platform that enables data analysts to interactively explore large datasets at lightning speed.  In addition to the general availability of its products, MapD announced that it has closed $10M in Series A funding from an investment syndicate led by Vanedge Capital with participation from Verizon Ventures and Nvidia Corporation, joining earlier investor GV (formerly Google Ventures).

The MapD database pioneers the use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to allow SQL queries to be executed in parallel across nearly 40,000 cores per server, yielding massive speedups over leading in-memory databases.  When paired with the MapD Immerse analytics front end, the system delivers instant visual insights into complex datasets.

MapD’s products have found significant early traction across a range of big data use cases, including log analytics, GIS, business intelligence, and social media analytics.  Early adopters have included Fortune 500 companies in the telecom, retail, finance, and adtech sectors.  MapD’s technology was incubated at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) by founder Todd Mostak under the supervision of database luminary Sam Madden.

Moe Kermani, Managing Partner of Vanedge Capital said, “MapD’s products allow businesses to analyze and interact with data at speeds never before possible. Analyses that used to take hours to complete can now be done in milliseconds. For customers, this means superior understanding of their data, real-time actionable insights, better and more timely decisions. We see this as a healthy investment round from a notable group of investors, and are excited to partner with Todd and his team.”

Jeff Herbst, VP of Business Development and head of Nvidia GPU Ventures said, “Startups like MapD are highly disruptive thanks to the power of GPUs. By using GPUs, MapD can process complex datasets faster, in a smaller footprint, using less energy than conventional big data solutions that only use CPUs. We believe MapD has a real chance at upending the status quo in data analytics.”

“Verizon Ventures chose to invest in MapD after seeing the performance and value which the product brought to our network infrastructure group.  MapD has taken commodity GPUs and turned them into a solution that can transform the analytics industry,” said Mark Smith, Executive Director at Verizon Ventures.

Rich Miner, General Partner at GV (formerly Google Ventures), said, "We have been working with MapD since they spun out of MIT, and have been impressed with the performance of the team and evolution of the product.  The breadth of problems that can be addressed and visualized with their blindingly fast GPU-based data engine are limitless."

Bringing GPU Power to Business Analytics

One of MapD’s early customers, Verizon, has seen the evidence of GPU computing’s ability to dramatically accelerate their data analytics process.  Principal Architect Abdul Subhan said, “MapD is a rapid SQL compatible database – in our benchmark tests, it returned query results in milliseconds.”

Television and digital advertising leader Simulmedia has been using MapD to assess inventory availability.  Principal Data Architect Kyle Hubert said, “MapD allows Simulmedia to easily and interactively explore large advertising datasets for detailed insights. It is simple to deploy and comes with an intuitive user interface for exploration via cross filtering, allowing business users to answer their questions in real time.”

“MapD has an innovative high-performance offering that combines GPU technology with the firm’s own columnar database and visualization frontend, making MapD well suited to help organizations drive real-time decision making,” said 451 Group’s Senior Analyst for Data Platforms & Analytics, James Curtis.

Founder and CEO of MapD Todd Mostak said, “By reducing the time it takes to analyze and visualize data from hours to milliseconds, we’re enabling organizations to spend significantly less time crunching data and more time analyzing it and making important decisions based on that data.  MapD’s orders-of-magnitude speed advantage will be hugely beneficial to industries and organizations where real-time decision making is critical.”

The MapD database and Immerse visualization platform are now available for deployment on premises, or in the cloud via IBM Softlayer or Amazon AWS. For more information or to get a demo of MapD on your own data, contact sales@mapd.com.