ParStream is a Germany-based big data team that was founded in 2008, and up until now ran on money from a few private investors including founders Michael Hummel and Jorg Bienert.

This week the startup announced that it received an impressive $5.4 million in a Series A round led by Khosla Ventures. Baker Capital, Crunch Fund, Data Collective, Tola Capital, and several unnamed angel investors also participated in the funding.

“We will use the proceeds of this round to further invest in our product roadmap and to accelerate ParStream’s growth in the US and global markets,” explains Mike Hummel, CEO and co-founder of ParStream. “We recently opened our US headquarters in Palo Alto, California and are receiving strong interest and demand from enterprise customers and independent software vendors who are building solutions that capture the opportunity associated with real-time data analytics delivered by our platform.”

ParStream’s sole offering is a big data engine that isn’t pitched as a revolutionary product and doesn’t have a lot of gimmicky features – it just runs well with very little latency.  It requires less physical infrastructure to support it than other software according to the company, can scale to multiple petabytes, and reduces lag to 1.1 milliseconds.

More and more new players are aligning themselves with real-time data. And this is a growing phenomenon in not just the enterprise space but also much closer to the consumer on the client level: one startup is working on taking out browser refreshes out of the equation.

Realtime recently raised a massive $100 million in funding for a messaging system that establishes a “bidirectional permanent link” between the server and the client, facilitating what is essentially data streaming on-demand for a web application. The system is highly scalable and can cut a lot of bandwidth usage according to the developer.