Cloudera Founder’s Enterprise Data App Management Startup WibiData Raises $15M From Canaan Partners, Eric Schmidt And Others

WibiData, the enterprise data management startup co-founded by Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia and Aaron Kimball, has raised $15 million in a Series B funding led by Canaan Partners with participation from existing investors, including NEA and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt.

Canaan Partners partner Ross Fubini has joined the WibiData board. NEA Partner Jon Sakoda will continue to serve on the board as well. This brings the company’s funding to over $20 million.

Simply put, WibiData builds large-scale data applications for companies. WibiData wants to help companies manage and analyze complex business data about users so you can predict how they are going to interact with the product in the future. Data such as email records, web histories and other interactions cannot be easily analyzed together, but WibiData aims to solve this problem. Specifically, the technology can be used for personalization for a number of web companies, including consumer web, e-commerce and gaming companies.

Bisciglia explains to us that the focus of the startup is connecting the models that data scientists build on backend of large online businesses in realtime to front end applications.

The company’s client base counts Wikipedia, Rich Relevance, Opower, and Atlassian. For example, Wikipedia has used WibiData to better understand their contributor community, such as analyzing revision histories, understanding individual areas of expertise, and identifying trends in contribution patterns. Another retail Big Data Application suite allows organizations to personalize content, improve search relevancy, deliver targeted recommendations and integrate anomaly detection directly into application channels across the web, mobile devices and in store.

On the backend, Cloudera leverages Apache Hadoop to manage and analyze large amounts of data. Bisciglia has in-depth experience with the technology as the founder of Cloudera, a developer and commercial distributor of Hadoop, the open source software that powers the data processing engines of the worldʼs largest and most popular web sites. Prior to Cloudera, Bisciglia was a senior engineer at Google where he founded and led Google’s Academic Cloud Computing Initiative, which provides Google hosted computational resources to facilitate education and research to universities around the world.

WibiData applications, says Bisiglia, are based on the open source Kiji.

Canaan Partners’ Fubini explains the firm’s investment in the company: “Christophe and the team have been at the vanguard of the Hadoop movement, providing unparalleled insight into the resources involved deploying Hadoop across Fortune 500 companies…WibiData’s Big Data Applications will be essential in delivering on the promise that Big Data offers enterprises.”

As for what the new funding will be used for, Bisiglia says that Wibidata, which now counts several large enterprises as customers, will be used towards major expansion. The company will be hiring more staff in sales, marketing, product and engineering and will likely triple in size in the coming year.

It comes of no surprise that investors and doubling down on the enterprise data space. And with Bisiglia as a founder, VCs are betting that he’ll be able to build another successful data and infrastructure company.