NorthScale Announces $10 Million in Funding, New CEO

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., May 18 /PRNewswire/ -- NorthScale, Inc., the leading provider of a new generation of elastic data infrastructure software, today announced it has secured $10 million in a Series B round of financing led by venture capital firm Mayfield Fund, with participation from Series A investors Accel Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners. The new funding will be used to continue the company's investment in innovation around noSQL database technologies and drive market adoption of NorthScale's family of scale-out data solutions for web applications and cloud computing. The company also announced that Bob Wiederhold has joined NorthScale as president and chief executive officer, bringing with him more than 25 years of high technology experience.

Funding Highlights:

• NorthScale, which emerged from stealth in March 2010, was founded by leaders of the open source memcached project, a data infrastructure technology at the core of 18 of the top 20 most heavily trafficked websites, and thousands of others.
• NorthScale is building on this foundation to deliver a new class of data management software – elastic data infrastructure – that offers substantial cost, performance and scalability advantages over relational database technology, for the vast majority of data associated with modern web applications and cloud computing environments.
• The new funding will be used to continue the company's investment in noSQL database technology innovation and drive market adoption of NorthScale's family of elastic data solutions, including NorthScale Memcached Server and NorthScale Membase Server.
• Mayfield Fund led the round, with pro rata investment by existing investors Accel Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners. Mayfield Fund Managing Director Robin Vasan has joined NorthScale's board of directors.

Bob Wiederhold Highlights:

• Bob Wiederhold joins NorthScale as president and chief executive officer.
• Most recently, Bob served as chairman, CEO and president of Transitive Corporation, the leader in cross-platform virtualization, acquired by IBM in 2008.
• Bob brings more than two decades of senior management experience in software and services to NorthScale. He has demonstrated continued success in managing privately funded companies from the start-up phase to multi-million dollar entities. In addition to Transitive this includes:
  • Cadence Design Systems, Inc., which he joined in 1985 as an early-stage start-up and helped grow to more than $1.5 billion during his 13 years in several executive management roles.
  • Tality Corporation, whose revenues and size grew to almost $200 million and 1,500 employees worldwide during his tenure as president and CEO.

Supporting Quotes:

Robin Vasan, Managing Director, Mayfield Fund:

"The next generation web application architecture assumes commodity and cloud computing, but scaling out the data layer is still an incredibly complex problem. Our investment in NorthScale reflects our belief in noSQL data management technologies as a significant opportunity for innovation, as well as our belief in NorthScale's strategy of leveraging the widespread adoption of the memcached key-value technology to provide a critical solution for scale out data."

Bob Wiederhold, President and CEO, NorthScale:

"There is a major technology transformation underway that revolves around the fundamental and expensive mismatch between the needs of modern web applications and the relational database technology typically used to support them. NorthScale's recently announced elastic data management solutions provide the kind of innovative, best-in-class software products that will accelerate this transformation. I am excited to combine my enterprise software experience with the great team that has already been assembled at NorthScale to rapidly grow the company."

Supporting Resources:

• Bob Wiederhold blog
• Bob Wiederhold photo
• NorthScale logo

Tags/Keywords:

NorthScale, Mayfield Fund, Accel Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, memcached, membase, elastic data infrastructure, noSQL, cloud computing, Bob Wiederhold, Robin Vasan

About NorthScale:

NorthScale, Inc., the leading provider of elastic data infrastructure software, provides products that enable customers to dramatically lower costs while simultaneously improving the scalability and performance of their web applications. NorthScale is in production behind some of the world's busiest web applications: it is the primary database for the popular FarmVille and Cafe World applications at Zynga; and it provides a shared data management platform for NHN, Korea's largest web application operator with nearly 70 million unique users. Equally at home serving small web applications, NorthScale operates the memcached service behind the Heroku Cloud Platform, where hundreds of applications benefit from its secure multi-tenant capabilities. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., NorthScale is a privately held company funded by Accel Partners, Mayfield Fund and North Bridge Venture Partners.

SOURCE NorthScale, Inc.