Metamarkets, a two year old startup that offers publishers better inside data by analyzing the huge quantities of data produced as they sell, just closed its latest round of funding. The company has secured $6 million in the round, which was led by Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Ventures with participation from most of the company’s existing investors. These include Village Ventures, True Ventures, Omnicom vet Jerry Neumann and Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, and they were all a part of Metamarkets’ $2.5 million round last year.

“Metamarkets will use the money to build out its 14-person engineering team. But the company’s existing workforce is already doing something right: I’m told that Twitter, among other potential acquirers, did some tire-kicking before the company closed this round.”

Metamarkets’ offering is steadily gaining itself some serious traction. Chief executive David Soloff says the startup already has three customers, for which it analyzes between three and five billion ad impressions per day – a number that can add up to around 500 terabytes, according to Soloff. The publishers Metamarkets serves in turn can use this data to price their inventory in real-time., and predict future patterns.

Originally, the concept on which Metamarkets was founded on is an idea of a data marketplace where buyers and sellers can gain insight into their position in the online ad market.

Big data is one of the hottest trends in all of IT, and some of the biggest players in the industry are also showing rapid adoption. The open-source Hadoop platform is the center point of this movement, and EMC recently entered into a licensing agreement with MapR. The commercial distributor of the software competes with Cloudera, another Hadoop distributor EMC has or at least had a partnership with in this area. IBM is also jumping aboard, and one of its ,attest big data analytics launches is the Hadoop-based InfoSphere BigInsights and Streams offering.