MapR received $50 million in equity financing to prove that there is still money in the open source big data market.

Along with the equity funding the company revealed that in Q2 2016 it achieved a more than 100% increase in bookings over the prior year with licenses and support agreements for the company’s Converged Data Platform representing 90% of total booking.

The company now has multiple software license transactions of more than $5m from new and existing customers, a customer retention rate of 99% and a host of new and expanded customers in Q2 such as American Express, Audi, Ericsson, NTT, Philips, Qualcomm, and more.

MapR’s equity financing was led by Future Fund while existing investors such as Google Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, New Enterprise Associated, Qualcomm Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures, all participated.

What this means is that it has now raised a total of $194 million in equity to date.

Importantly for MapR it shows that investors are still backing the start-up to be a success as a leading vendor in the Hadoop ecosystem.

John Schroeder, founder and CEO, MapR Technologies, “Our ongoing momentum is fuelled by a world-class team that is driving innovation and growth across every facet of our organisation.

“This new funding strengthens our balance sheet as we look ahead to an initial public offering.”  

Making money in the open source Hadoop world isn’t always easy and with so many vendors competing it can be a challenge to create a competitive differentiator.

For MapR that differentiator is the Converged Data Platform, which is designed to offer distributed processing, real-time analytics and more across cloud and on-premise environments. Tapping into technologies such as Spark has also helped the company to gain a strong foothold in the market.

Considered one of the leaders in the Hadoop ecosystem alongside Hortonworks and Cloudera, MapR will be looking to catch up with Cloudera, which has to date raised over $1bn, and Hortonworks which had a strong IPO in 2014.

Despite a strong IPO, that raised $100 million, Hortonworks has been missing targets and has seen its share price fall.

The problem for many vendors in the ecosystem is that vast amounts of money are being spent on R&D in order to break forward in the market and develop new and exciting technologies. The hope is that this will pay off in both the short term and the long, but currently there is pain being felt and an increasingly urgent need to remedy it.

MapR itself is planning for an initial public offering, although no estimated dates have yet been given, it might be getting closer based on the positive investment and favourable position it seems to be in.  

Barry Eggers, managing partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners said: “Enterprise computing is going through one of the biggest transformations in decades and companies that are serious about leveraging data as a disruptive advantage are relying on MapR.

"The company has consistently demonstrated strong growth over several years and we believe its technology lead will continue to drive its success.”