MapR, one of the data management companies vying to help businesses grapple with the onslaught of information they process and store, announced a $50 million equity financing today and revealed that it’s considering an initial public offering.
San Jose, CA-based MapR, a competitor to Cloudera and Hortonworks, sells software designed to integrate the data that businesses collect and crunch in both on-site computers and through Web-based applications. Its “converged data platform” also offers data analytics features based on Hadoop, Spark, and other open source software. MapR counts American Express, Audi, Ericsson, Philips, and Qualcomm among its customers.
MapR’s $50 million fundraising round was led by Future Fund, and joined by previous investors Google Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, New Enterprise Associates, Qualcomm Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and others. The new capital brings MapR’s total equity fundraising to $194 million.
John Schroeder, the company’s founder and CEO, said the financing sets MapR up for an entry into the public market. “This new funding strengthens our balance sheet as we look ahead to an initial public offering,” Schroeder said in a written statement.
If MapR goes ahead with a public offering, it would be following another data integration company, Talend, into the thin ranks of recent tech IPO’s. Talend, which is co-headquartered in Redwood City, CA and Suresnes, near Paris, France, raised at least $95 million in its initial public offering in June. On the first day of trading, shares in Talend (NASDAQ: [[ticker:TLND]]) rose more than 50 percent from their IPO price of $18, and still hover at around $25. That puts the company’s market capitalization at more than $700 million.
Hortonworks’ $100 million IPO followed a similar pattern, with an even larger stock price jump of 65 percent to more than $26 in its trading debut in December of 2014, Bloomberg reported. That put the company’s market cap at $1.1. billion. But as Business Insider noted, news of a secondary offering early this year punctured the value of Hortonworks (NASDAQ: [[ticker:HDP]]) The shares traded today just above $9.
