Accel builds $100 million fund for big data startups

Big Data Fund debuts at Hadoop World Conference, aims to attract more talent to big data ecosystem

Investing in companies that handle big data has piqued Accel Partners' interest in the past and the venture firm announced Tuesday that it was creating a $100 million big data fund for promising startups.

Accel's Big Data Fund will inject needed capital into companies ranging from next generation storage and data management platforms to a wide range of revolutionary software applications. 
The venture firm made the announcement at the Hadoop World Conference in New York.

Accel Partners will manage its Big Data Fund across global offices in U.S., London, China and India.

"As Big Data platforms such as Hadoop and others continue to gain rapid adoption and become more mainstream, we are seeing an exciting wave of next generation business applications emerge," said Ping Li of Accel Partners, in a statement. "Vendors that effectively pave the way for big data to be leveraged for ever-evolving business use cases, such as Cloudera – the leader in Apache Hadoop-based software and services and an Accel-backed company – will determine the winners in this next wave of cloud computing."

Accel announced on Monday  its involvement in the most recent $40 million funding round that Cloudera Inc. received. Cloudera is a provider of Apache Hadoop-based data management software and services. That Series D funding round was led by Frank Artale of Ignition Partners and joined by existing investors Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and In-Q-Tel.

Cloudera said that the funding will be used to "support aggressive growth and increased momentum in the marketplace" and "further expand its marketing and sales operations, and support key strategic initiatives."

Used by some of the world's leading social media and ecommerce companies, including eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, 
Apache Hadoop is an open source technology that addresses immense scalability for companies with expansive data to sorth through in the online space.

In the past Accel has also funded CouchBase and Fusion-IO in the big data space.
Accel is planning a big data conference in Silicon Valley and has named several advisers for the big data fund to help guide Accel, including Cloudera Architect Doug Cutting, Cloudera Chief Scientist Jeff Hammerbacher, Bitly Chief Scientist Hilary Mason and former SolarWinds Chief Product Strategist Kenny Van Zant, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Accel's Big Data Fund aims to attract the most innovative and thoughtful entrepreneurs into the data ecosystem to address the opportunities with new technologies and through collaboration.

The big data market still holds great opportunity and Accel is looking to lead the marketplace as more mobile, commerce and gaming require data-intensive solutions.

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