Riptano, the Commercial Cassandra Company, Raises $2.7 Million in Series A Funding

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Riptano™ Incorporated announced today the closing of $2.7 million Series A financing. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the financing with participation from Sequoia Capital and private investor Jason Calacanis. Riptano is the company providing software, support and training for Apache Cassandra, which is an open source database developed through the combination of Amazon and Google technology.

“Data is growing at an exponential rate. It’s a challenge that everyone is facing”

Riptano Co-Founder and CEO Matt Pfeil announced that the company has added John Vrionis of Lightspeed Venture Partners to its board.

“Data is growing at an exponential rate. It’s a challenge that everyone is facing,” Pfeil said. “Cassandra is a distributed database for big data that rapidly scales on commodity hardware in the cloud or across your own data centers, which saves companies money and developers time.”

In 2008, Facebook developed Cassandra and released it to the open-source community as an Apache Software Foundation project. Jonathan Ellis became the project chair and earlier this year co-founded Riptano. “Cassandra is much faster at writes than traditional databases and also fast at reads due to the efficient use of memory and minimal disk seeks,” Ellis said. “To increase performance, a business can simply add machines to the cluster.”

With the investment, Riptano is hiring developers to work full-time on Cassandra, building a business team to serve its customers, creating Cassandra resources and developing performance management software.

“High performance, scalable database technology is one of the most important datacenter infrastructure categories for the next decade. Processing large scale data has been cost prohibitive or too technically difficult for all but the most sophisticated IT organizations until now,” Vrionis said. “Cassandra is the clear market leader, with a strong customer base, rapidly growing developer community and best-in-class technology. Riptano is poised to become the next great database company.”

About Lightspeed Venture Partners

Lightspeed Venture Partners is a leading global venture capital firm with over $2 billion of committed capital under management. Lightspeed’s investment professionals and advisors work closely with portfolio companies to help them establish global market leadership. The firm is headquartered in Silicon Valley with additional offices in China, India and Israel. Over the past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed several hundred companies, many of which have become leaders in their respective markets, including Blue Nile, Brocade, Calista, Ciena, DoubleClick, eHealth Insurance, Galileo Technology, Growth Networks, Informatica, Kiva Software, LightLogic, Maker Communications, Metasolv, Phone.com, Quantum Effect Devices, Riverbed, Sirocco, Virsa Systems and Waveset. For more information, visit the Lightspeed website: www.lightspeedvp.com.

About Riptano

Riptano is the commercial company for Cassandra, a scalable and high performance open source database. Riptano offers software, support, and training for Cassandra. Capable of both online transactions and analytical workloads, Cassandra offers distribution of data across multiple data centers and incremental scalability with no single points of failure. Cassandra is the logical choice when reliability is needed without compromising performance. Riptano brings Cassandra to the enterprise. Investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Rackspace Hosting Inc. and Jason Calacanis. For information on Riptano, visit www.riptano.com.