Platfora, one of the latest Hadoop distributors, announced it has closed a $5.7 million  series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. In-Q-Tel, “the independent strategic investment firm that identifies innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the U.S. intelligence community,” also participated in the financing round.

Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Scott Weiss will be joining the company’s board.

Platfora, which was founded by Ben Werther, former product head of Greenplum, is kicking things off on the right foot.  Andreessen Horowitz is a pretty high profile VC firm, and considering that it invested in players such as Box, expectations around the startup will likely be going up.

Here’s what Werther said in a released statement:

“Businesses are increasingly looking to Hadoop, rather than traditional databases, to store their fast-growing datasets. We transform Hadoop from promising back-end technology into an effortless, interactive and beautiful way for business users to get rapid insight and answers from any sized dataset, even those with petabytes of information.”

Platfora aims to simplify Hadoop using the platform it built on the open-source software, which evidently targets both private and public sectors customers with big data backloads.

The news of Platfora’s funding follows a similar update from MapR, another startup that competes with its Hadoop distros. The company announced late last month that it has secured $20 million from  Redpoint Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates. MapR also has a promising outlook, thanks to the fact it runs faster than some of its competitors, and that it has built a solid partner ecosystem that includes EMC and others.  The latter’s Enterprise Edition Hadoop  is built almost entirely on M5, the paid version of MapR’s offering.