Accel Partners raise $100 Million Big Data Fund to Invest in Hadoop, NoSQL and other Companies

Accel Partners, the venture capital firm, has recently announced that it has managed to raise a big data fund of $100 million which the firm is going to invest in companies which are focusing on building new IT infrastructure or on applications which already use a new infrastructure. Accel Partners is a venture capital firm which is based in Palo Alto, Calif., which is the heart of the Silicon Valley’s venture capital community. This venture capital firm has previously invested in companies which turned out to be a great success on the market, such as Facebook, Dropbox, Cloudera and Etsy.

This is how Accel Partners got around to finding out how big companies such as Facebook itself find themselves in the situation of having to exploit new technologies in order to be able to store and analyze the incredibly large amount of data they had to deal with in a more efficient manner. This is how they got to understand the increasing need of the market for new technologies which can easily adapt to the new virtual reality. This is how they got to know, by the means of Facebook, the open source project Hadoop, which is the company which helps Facebook process the billion of messages received on a daily basis. They have also gotten around to NoSQL database technology project, another of the companies who have provided help for Facebook. Accel Partners have such wise found about the need for new technologies, but they have also found out about some of the companies which can provide this help and have thus taken the decision of financially supporting them as well as they are now aware of their importance on the market, especially as all of the very important and large Web companies, such as Google, Yahoo and Twitter, are using the services of these platforms in order to build and develop applications.

Ping Li, one of the partners at Accel who has led the investments made by the firm in companies like Cloudera, which is one of the companies which commercializes the technology provided by Hadoop, has stated that this new fund of capital is going to be used for investments in two types of companies: the companies that build new infrastructure such as storage, security and management, and in the companies that build applications which use that infrastructure, such as business intelligence, collaboration, mobile and vertical applications. He also added the fact that these companies are going to span everything there is on the market, from enterprise to gaming, all of which are going to need new types of data-intensive platforms. He has also mentioned the fact that these investments are going to be made globally.

It is quite a common fact that, in the previous 30 years, legacy data platforms, including relational databases, led to the emergence of important companies such as Oracle, SAP and Symantec. Li has also added that the big data is going to usher in a new era of multi-billion software companies. The money for this fund comes from the company’s already existing funds, so this is not a new dollop of cash. In order to discuss the new technologies used in this sector and the trends which can now be seen on the market, Accel Partners intend to host a “big data” conference in spring 2012.