CommonAngels Leads $1.5M Seed Round for ParElastic

ParElastic, a developer of middleware for running big data applications more efficiently on the cloud, said it has closed a $1.5 million seed funding round, led by CommonAngels, with participation from Launch Capital and other investors. John Landry will be joining the company’s board of directors.

The company is setting up a development center in Toronto and is also looking for permanent office space in the Boston area, CTO and founder Amrith Kumar told me on a phone call today. Kumar previously worked at data technology companies such as Dataupia, Netezza, and Sepaton. Co-founder Ken Rugg had previous stints at Progress Software and eXcelon.

ParElastic’s technology is designed to enable cloud-based applications running on relational databases to better respond to spikes in demand, without having to run on high-capacity continuously. The idea is to cut down on operating costs and make it easier for developers to create database applications for the cloud.

“Big data is not only analytics, big data is there for everybody,” Kumar says. “That’s really what we’re trying to do—bring big data to the general purpose cloud, so everyone can benefit.”

Author: Erin Kutz

Erin Kutz has a background in covering business, politics and general news. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University. Erin previously worked in the Boston bureau of Reuters, where she wrote articles on the investment management and mutual fund industries. While in college, she researched for USA Today reporter Jayne O’Donnell’s book, Gen Buy: How Tweens, Teens and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing Retail. She also spent a semester in Washington, DC, reporting Capitol Hill stories as a correspondent for two Connecticut newspapers and interning in the Money section of USA Today, where she assisted with coverage on the retail and small business beats. Erin got her first taste of reporting at Boston University’s independent student newspaper, as a city section reporter and fact checker and editor of the paper’s weekly business section.