Big data search specialist Maana has ‘emerged from stealth’ to reveal over $14 million in funding from Chevron and ConocoPhillips’ technology venture arms and other VCs. Palo Alto-based Maana was founded in 2012 and describes its technology as ‘the first and only’ big data search engine powered by the open source Apache Spark, a general purpose engine for large-scale data processing.
In its stealth mode Maana has been under test at several unnamed Fortune 500 companies for machine learning and data mining. Founder and CTO Donald Thompson said, ‘Working with large technical datasets from different sources requires speed and sophisticated analysis. Previously we were running on Hadoop/MapReduce but this was not producing the performance we required. So we migrated to Spark which is easier to use and better. Spark gives our data scientists and customers familiar languages and tools. Switching to Spark was a business decision we didn’t take lightly. But we never looked back.’
Maana runs natively on Spark. In-memory caching allows for re-use of elements of an analysis, speeding performance by keeping frequently requested data in memory and reducing the need for database queries.
Co-founder and CEO Babur Ozden added, ‘Operations and maintenance involves connecting technical datasets from a large number of data sources. Search is now the easiest way to make such connections scalably. Maana is now expanding search to embrace core enterprise data assets.’ Other Maana backers include Frost Data Capital, GE Ventures and Intel Capital.
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