The funding will fuel Qubole’s expansion plans in APAC – the hotbed for big data, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning talent.
The big data-as-a-service company Qubole today announced a $25 million strategic round of funding led by Singtel Innov8 and Harmony Partners with participation from existing investors Charles River Ventures (CRV), Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and Institutional Venture Partners (IVP). The capital will be deployed for Qubole’s APAC expansion.
Earlier, the company raised its Series C funding of $30 million in January 2016. The current round takes the total amount of funding raised till date to $75 million.
Qubole was co-founded in 2013 by Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sen Sarma who were part of building and leading the original Facebook Data Service team from 2007-2011 during which they authored many prominent data industry tools, including the Apache Hive project.
Qubole claims to be the largest cloud-agnostic big data platform in the world. It’s also building the industry’s first autonomous cloud-based data platform – Qubole Data Service (QDS). QDS removes the burden of maintaining infrastructure and enables customers to focus on their data. It is context-aware, self-managing, and self-learning to deliver unbeatable agility, flexibility, and total cost of ownership. Qubole customers process nearly an exabyte of data every month.
Qubole, which has a central office in Bengaluru and a sales office in Singapore, is led by Joydeep Sen Sarma, who is the Co-founder and CTO.
Globally, Qubole has a team of 250 people with around 130 people working in India. Across geographies, their product and engineering functions have around 120-130 people while the rest of the team comprises sales, marketing, tech solutions and support, HR and finance. According to Joydeep Sen Sarma, the company has been doubling its team strength in India every year.
Qubole looks to expand its presence across SouthEast Asia, including India, Australia, and Singapore. Continuing the company’s momentum, Qubole also announced the appointments of Kevin Kennedy as Chief Operating Officer and Mohit Bhatnagar as Senior Vice President of Products. Joydeep says,
The key goal of the strategic investment is to further strengthen our efforts in R&D and marketing, and the expansion in the APAC region – this is geared towards making Qubole the leader in helping enterprises around the world to successfully meet with their big data project goals.
Qubole has an ARR in multiples of tens of millions of dollars and has a growing revenue at more than 100 percent year-over-year.
Qubole’s target market consists of three segments:
While Qubole has customers all around the globe, a major portion of them is based in North America and Europe. In India, they have around 15 percent of the clients. Its customers across India include Ola Cabs, Saavn, and Indix, while the global ones include the likes of Autodesk, Lyft, Samsung, and Under Armour. The company is also looking at partnerships with other firms, such as global system integrators, niche/vertical-specific analytics firms, and boutique analytics firms.
Qubole’s key competitors include Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, and Databricks. According to IDC, worldwide revenues for big data and business analytics will grow from $130.1 billion in 2016 to more than $203 billion in 2020, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.7 percent. In addition to being the industry with the largest investment in big data and business analytics solutions (nearly $17 billion in 2016), banking will see the fastest spending growth.
