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Raj Cherabuddi co-founded Kickfire Secures $20 Mn

si Team
Monday, September 22, 2008
si Team
The Raj Cherabuddi co-founded Kickfire, a data warehousing appliance provider, has closed $20 million series B round of financing of led by Pinnacle Ventures. The funding was joined by Series A investors -Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, and Mayfield fund. The capital will be used to build out the sales, marketing, and customer operations infrastructure to bring the Kickfire appliance to market.

“Kickfire has a total of $30.75 million invested to date. There are almost 10 to 15 Venture Capitalist backed companies in both the U.S. and Europe in the analytics database and appliance market. Our research indicates that some of these companies have raised over $50 million funding. This suggests that VCs have invested at least half a billion dollars in this market,” says Cherabuddi, CEO and President, Kickfire.

In a July 2008 report titled ‘Market Update: Open Source Databases’, Forrester Research estimates the size of the open source database market including software licensing, technical support, and services will reach $1.2 billion by 2010. “More enterprises are deploying open source databases than ever before, with many planning mission-critical deployments in the coming years,” states Noel Yuhanna, Principal analyst.

Identifying the trend, the Santa Clara based Kickfire has built a data-warehousing appliance for analysis and reporting of data from the MySQL database. Most other data warehousing appliances are built using open-source databases such as PostgreSQL or Ingres, but they all add some proprietary element. Kickfire’s strength is in its compatibility with MySQL. So its customers can run any application that runs on MySQL without making adjustments to those applications.

The company that houses 55 employees works with retailers, service providers, and network management companies to solve their MySQL analytics. It sees a demand from larger enterprises that are tired of the high license, hardware, and maintenance costs of traditional data warehousing systems where total costs can often be as high as $1 million per terabyte of data in the data warehouse.

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