YCombinator-funded Cloudant, a database platform built around Apache’s open source CouchDB framework, officially launches after three years of hard work.
Cloud-based like Cloudera and Amazon Web Services and part of the NoSQL movement, Cloudant scales your database on the CloudDB framework but also provides hosting, administrative tools, analytics and support so “You don’t have to think a lot up front about what your database is going to look like.”
Going up against Goliaths like Oracle, Cloudant focuses on scalability, flexibility, and high availability. Its method of data storage is ideal in any situation in which data is generated in a distributed way, such as with sensor networks, web servers, and mobile device service, in essence “small companies with big data.”
Cloudant was founded by MIT Physics PhDs Alan Hoffman, Adam Kocoloski, and Mike Miller and recently received a seed round of $1 million dollars from Avalon Ventures.
The company currently has has 1,300 users and 10 paying customers and hopes to be the leading provider of CloudDB moving forward. Says founder Mike Miller about future plans, “There will be some huge changes in what web stacks will look like and we want to remain poised to be the cloud service that underlies those technologies.”