ZEPL, an enterprise analytics company, has closed a US$ 4.1 million Series A funding round, led by Singapore-based Vertex Ventures. The round also saw participation from other investors which included Translink Capital, Specialized Types, and Big Basin Capital.
This funding round also debuted with a fresh new brand – ZEPL, similarly founded by the creators of Apache Zeppelin to replace the formerly known NFLabs.
“Our new brand identity, ZEPL – Zeppelin RELP – reflects our mission to provide an interface for modern day analytics workflow,” said Sejun Ra, the co-founder and CEO of ZEPL.
“For decades, enterprise analytics has been mired in silos – data silos, skill silos, team silos – that regardless of computational power, hindered speed and efficiency of analytics,” Sejun explains.
He continues, saying that “And though recent advances in Hadoop, Spark and other compute frameworks, alleviate some of the data silos issues, the myriad of choices further compounds the skill and team silos.”
In this case, Apache Zeppelin attempts to break down those walls providing a pluggable and open-source solution that enables data engineers, data scientists, and business analysts to use and share the same interface to source, process and analyse various data types.
Besides, using its JDBC Interpreter, Apache Zeppelin supports a majority of the modern day frameworks, from Spark, Cassandra, MongoDB, Elastic Search as well as standard relational databases such as Oracle and MySQL.
The data product is also integrated and available with various services such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Dataproc, as well as most of the major Haddop distributions.
“We have been watching the organic growth of Zeppelin for some time, and are incredibly impressed with the demand and adoption of the technology, by everyone from small teams to the largest Fortune 100 companies,” said In Sik Rhee, the General Partner of Vertex Ventures that will be joining ZEPL’s company board.
Vertex Ventures is a network of funds that invest in and guides technology companies to an exit event, with Singapore’s state investment fund Temasek Holdings as a primary limited partner (LP).
“Enterprises have been clamoring for a way to seamlessly apply analytics across their organization. The team at ZEPL has a clear vision to drastically change the way companies leverage analytics to further their business goals, and we are pleased to support them as they expand Zeppelin’s reach,” In Sik Rhee adds.
With this new funding, ZEPL looks forward to expanding the Apache Zeppelin experience to enable the delivery of a single platform for end-to-end data analytics workflow.
According to ZEPL, Apache Zeppelin is fast becoming the standard big data visualization interface to explore and conduct deep data analysis. It also sees a significant adoption by corporate across different industry verticals, ranging from finance to high technology enterprises.
“Our mission is to transform the way people engage with data, and make big data analytics accessible and easy to use by anyone within an organization,” said Moon Soo Lee, creator of Apache Zeppelin and co-founder and CTO of ZEPL. “By building on top of Apache Zeppelin’s extensible, pluggable, open interface, we believe we can tear down the walls that currently limit how organizations leverage and communicate analytics.”
By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media
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