During his time at Yahoo Inc., Dave Mariani had a chance to experience the challenges involved in processing data on a large scale close up. Employees at the web giant employed several different analytics tools as part of their work that each required Mariani’s team to maintain a separate set of supporting technologies and processes.

To help other enterprises struggling with the same burden, the entrepreneur founded AtScale Inc. in 2013. The startup today announced that it has closed a $25 million funding round led by Dublin-based Atlantic Bridge Capital.

AtScale sells a platform for easing the logistics of large-scale analytics projects. At a high level, it’s designed to serve as an abstraction layer for the Hadoop cluster or other backend environments containing a company’s most important data. Tableau, Excel and the other business intelligence products used by employees can all be connected to the software.

It’s a simpler arrangement than directly hooking them up to the data sources. The business logic necessary to turn raw records into a form that lends itself to processing only has to be implemented on AtScale’s platform, instead of separately for each tool. Many of the other often overlapping processes needed to support analysis can be consolidated as well.

The software further streamlines operations by avoiding unnecessary data movement. Instead of having to pull information into their analytics tool or some external system, users can push their queries directly to the backend environment where the records are stored. This approach eliminates the delay of moving them across the network and frees up bandwidth in the process.

In the same spirit, AtScale uses machine learning algorithms to automatically find the fastest way of executing a query. The startup said that Yellow Pages Canada, one of its flagship customers, has seen data processing speeds 10 to 20 times faster since adopting its software.

AtScale will use the new funding to keep driving adoption. Besides Atlantic Bridge Capital, the round saw the participation of Wells Fargo & Co., Industry Ventures and several returning investors.  

Image: SiliconANGLE