In-Q-Tel, an investment company with ties to the U.S. intelligence community is taking a stake – the amount is undisclosed — in Cloudant, the Boston-based NoSQL specialist.
The beauty of Cloudant’s technology is it lets web and mobile companies build and deploy big data applications fairly easily without having to worry about underlying infrastructure.
Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle
The strategic stake means that IQT will vet and promote the use of Cloudant’s NoSQL-based Cloudant Data Layer as a service by U.S. government agencies. The beauty of Cloudant’s technology is it lets web and mobile companies build and deploy big data applications fairly easily.
Cloudant raised $4 million in venture capital from Avalon Ventures in 2010, and now has additional cash from IQT. “This deal gives us three things,” Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle told me.
“First, if you can prove to In-Q-tel that you can solve the problems their customers have at the scale they need, it’s a high bar to get over, but once you do, you have credibility. Second, the capital will help. And third, In-Q-Tel can help get us into other [non-intelligence-related] government entities,” he said.
IQT has been on a bit of tear lately. Just two weeks ago it took a stake in 10gen, the company behind MongoDB, another NoSQL player. That investment came just days after news of an IQT investment in Huddle, the UK-based provider of cloud collaboration technology. As Derrick Harris has reported, the Arlington, Va.-based strategic investment company also took stakes in other database or big-data inflected companies including Cloudera, Platfora, Digital Reasoning, Recorded Future and Palantir Technologies.
The government, clearly, has a lot of information to handle and a lot of constituencies that need to view or massage that data. And, it apparently has money to spend on technologies to solve those problems.
Spooky and mysterious? Hardly, I’d say In-Q-Tel is pretty straight forward. I pitched someone there last year and he was just as open, honest, and polite as the best of anyone else I met with.
i just meant “spook” in the sense of the CIA use of that term… CIA spies = spooks.
Nah, Jeff Martens- they mean SPOOK-y. We pitch them but our business model wasn’t invasive enough for them…like their favorite investment, face book .
Reblogged this on broadcast digital delivery and manage ment and commented:
We pitched these guys but our business model wasn’t invasive enough for their “client”.