Databricks, the company created by Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia and Scott Shenker to commercialize their Apache Spark and Shark products, today announced to have raised $14 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. This investment is going to be used to increase the marketing of those products.
The news was given more in depth by GigaOm as Databricks’ website only mentions that the company is deeply committed to open-source and adding to be using a cutting-edge technology to build next-generation software for analyzing and extracting value from data.
Spark is a big data platform written in Scala and it is used by Yahoo, Airbnb, ClearStory Data and others. Shark (shorthand for “Hive on Spark”) is a data warehousing framework compatible with Apache Hive but specifically designed to run atop Spark rather than Hadoop MapReduce.