Teradata Combines Aster Data with its San Diego Labs in $263M Deal

pay $263 million for the rest of the startup. Aster Data has raised at least $53 million from investors since it was founded in mid-2005 (it still has $21 million on its balance sheet), and now has about 50 employees.

Some of Aster Data’s key investors also were early investors in Google. As TechCrunch reported in 2008, the distributed computing startup raised an angel round of about $1 million from David Cheriton, a Stanford University computer science professor (and Granite Systems co-founder), Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital, computer visionary Ron Conway, and Anand Rajaraman, founder of Junglee and Kosmix. Cheriton and Sequoia Capital, which took Aster’s entire A round in May, 2007, also were early investors in Google. Other investors are Institutional Venture Partners, Jafco Ventures, Cambrian Ventures, and Stanford computer science professor Rajeev Motwani.

Teradata’s Boyle tells me that while Teradata is a leader in relational data mining analytics that use massively parallel programming and petabyte-size databases, Aster Data specializes in SQL-based MapReduce programming—a hot, emerging field of non-relational parallelized data processing.

The non-relational analytics technology enables Aster Data to quickly gather data, such as Web logs and click streams, from clusters of servers that power a company’s Web-facing systems. Once stored in a database, the information can be analyzed to better understand customer behavior—for example, enabling such Aster Data customers as LinkedIn, Zynga, and Barnes & Noble to determine who the influencers are in a Web community.

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.