MemSQL is a brand new Y Combinator startup that announced a $5 million funding round today. A number of venture capital firms participated along with angel investors Paul Buchheit, Max Levchin, Aaron Levie and Ashton Kutcher, who has among other things Hollywood-related, also made a name for himself in the Silicon Valley VC scene.

MemSQL took the opportunity to debut its first product. The big data team is touting its offering as a database solution that “combines speed and a robust SQL interface within an in-memory data tier.”  What the software actually does is convert SQL to C++, a high-performance low level programming language, and places customer data in memory. This allows the startup to speed things up considerably and return results 30 times faster than traditional disk-based alternatives, according to a release that went out this morning.

“Quickly sifting through actionable data has become a competitive advantage in the enterprise, particularly as organizations are saddled with increasingly large and complex data sets,” said Eric Frenkiel, CEO, MemSQL. “MemSQL was designed to tackle Big Data problems by increasing an application’s throughput 30 times over and still offer SQL, unlike other solutions which are either too slow or too limited in functionality.”

The performance boost that MemSQL promises could appeal to a very broad range of industries, especially the financal services sector where reaction time is a particularly important aspect of business.

MemSQL is looking to make analytics faster, while other startups such as Precog are looking to maker it simpler and more accessible. The latter raised $2 million not too long ago for a web-based solution that enables developers to incorporate data-driven features into their apps with minimal hassle. From the user’s point of view, the bulk of the process is reduced to a drag n drop interface and an API.