Data infrastructure startup NorthScale gets $10M and a new CEO
NorthScale, the recently-launched data infrastructure company whose first customers include social gaming giant Zynga, just raised a $10 million second round of funding. The round was led by Mayfield Fund, with participation from existing investors Accel Partners (which also helped bring the founding team together) and North Bridge Venture Partners.
The Mountain View, Calif. company also announced some changes to the executive lineup. It’s bringing on Bob Wiederhold, whose two decades of experience includes serving as chairman and CEO of virtualization company Transitive, which was acquired by IBM in 2008. Previously, NorthScale didn’t have an official CEO, so Wiederhold said he asked cofounder and chief strategy officer James Phillips to shift to chief product officer.
NorthScale’s products are built around open source memory technology memcached, whose popularity has grown as a tool for web applications like Facebook to manage their growing data needs. The company says it includes key contributors to the technology, with its technical staff contributing more than half the code base to memcached.
It has already launched one product, the NorthScale Memcached Server, which is basically a commercial version of memcached that runs alongside a standard relational database. This summer NorthScale plans to release its second product, a new kind of database called the NorthScale Membase Server.
“The truth is that our biggest problem has been lots of people calling in wanting to know a lot more about Membase in particular,” Wiederhold said. “We can’t wait to let these hundreds of people get access.”
NorthScale has now raised $15 million in total funding.
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