[Updated 12:20pm. See below] A buzz-worthy New England tech startup is relocating from Connecticut to the Boston area after raising a sizable venture capital round, Xconomy has learned.
New Haven, CT-based Hadapt has closed a Series A financing round, according to two sources with knowledge of the company. One source puts the round at $8 million. The other source says that, as part of the deal, the company will move to the Boston area (probably Cambridge)—which it may have wanted to do anyway. I don’t know who the investors are yet, but I’m betting at least one Boston venture firm is involved (and I have my guesses). Hadapt is planning to release the information soon, but declined to speak with Xconomy about any details yet.
[Updated] A new report in GigaOm says the round is $9.5 million—but that might include earlier seed money (see below). The lead investors are Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, according to the report.
Hadapt (pronounced “huh-DAPT”) spun out of Yale University in 2010. It specializes in combining advanced databases with an open source data-analysis platform called Hadoop. The goal is to allow business customers to analyze huge amounts of data, both structured (like spreadsheets) and unstructured (like free text), in a very fast and efficient way. (Hadapt’s name is a play on Hadoop and the startup’s “adaptive analytical platform.”)
The company is led by CEO and co-founder Justin Borgman, a Yale MBA who did his undergraduate work at UMass Amherst and started his career in the Boston area as a software developer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Raytheon. Borgman told me back in March that Hadapt had raised an initial funding round, mostly from angel investors. The company had seven full-time employees back in the spring, but that is bound to increase significantly now.
The move to Boston makes a lot of sense, as Hadapt wants to position itself as a business-intelligence and analytics company among some big players in “big data” and data warehousing like Netezza/IBM, EMC, Oracle, and Vertica/HP, all of which have roots or significant operations in Massachusetts. In the short term, there is plenty of talent and customers to be found here that will help Hadapt build what could be a very solid business.
