In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the U.S. intelligence community, has participated in the funding round of Platfora. Platfora, a startup focused on generating effortless insights from big data, has raised $5.7 million in Series A funding to expand and accelerate development of its intuitive and richly interactive BI and analytics platform for data stored in Hadoop.
Hadoop lacks the interactivity and sophisticated reporting capabilities needed by business users. Platfora works with existing Hadoop clusters, including Cloudera, MapR, and Amazon EMR, among others, and automatically turns the questions of business users into dimensional and predictive dashboards, reports and insights.
A recent report Hadoop-MapReduce Market Forecast 2013-2018 named steep learning curve and shortage of Hadoop-MapReduce trained professionals among the market inhibitors. Platfora works toward resolving these issues to speed up Hadoop deployment.