Big data analytics service RapidMiner has announced a $5m Series A funding round led by Earlybird Venture Capital and the MySQL founders’ investment arm, Open Ocean Capital. RapidMiner claims to have over 200,000 daily active users – clients include Lufthansa, PayPal, Pepsi, Siemens and Volkswagen.
Founded in Germany and with offices in the US, RapidMiner will use the funding to expand domestic and international sales and marketing, plus develop new products in its predictive analytics product line.
RapidMiner board member and former data mining head at Microsoft, Usama Fayyad, said: “Unlike traditional, older predictive analytics solutions, RapidMiner allows users without any programming expertise to quickly analyse enterprise data and build predictive models that keep pace with the requirements of big data.”
Founders Ralf Klinkenberg, Ingo Mierswa, and Simon Fischer began working on RapidMiner in 2001, it started as a project for the artificial intelligence unit of Dortmund University.
German VC Earlybird announced it raised a €150m fund in July and said it was moving towards more later-stage deals, with a focus on European startups. It most recently invested in Jumpstarter, a Stockholm-based productivity tool for developers, and French secondhand fashion marketplace Videdressing.
Author: Michelle Kuepper