Instaclustr Closes $7m Private Round to Fuel Expansion Plans
November 23, 2016

Canberra, 23 November, 2016: Instaclustr has closed a $7m investment round, led by Bailador Technology Investments (ASX: BTI).

BTI invested $4m, alongside $2m from new incoming investor Our Innovation Fund, LP and existing investor ANU Connect Ventures, the Fund Manager for the ANU-MTAA Super Venture Capital Partnership, and others, investing the balance of $1m.

Instaclustr is an open source data platform for cloud-based solutions that require immense scale, providing enterprise support and managed solutions for technologies such as Apache Cassandra (used by Apple, Netflix and Facebook), Apache Spark, and ScyllaDB. It provides customers significant value by removing the complexities and operational overhead associated with managing data for applications that have global reach, while achieving zero downtime, allowing customers to focus on building and managing their core software applications.

The company delivered year-on-year growth in recurring revenue of more than 100 per cent and currently generates more than 90 per cent of its revenue outside of Australia. Its customer base includes global technology companies such as Campaign Monitor, AdStage and MathsPathway. The company also partners with leading technology companies, Accenture and IBM, addressing the data management needs of global enterprises.

Instaclustr’s technology addresses the needs of companies with massive data management requirements, with a particular focus on five key use cases: internet of things, personalisation, messaging, fraud detection and list management.

Instaclustr was founded in Canberra in 2013 by co-founders Ben Bromhead and Adam Zegelin, and initially bootstrapped by Peter Lilley and Doug Stuart following the exit of their prior company, Stratsec, to BAE Systems in 2011.

The company is headquartered in Canberra with US regional headquarters situated in Redwood City, California. The CEO, Peter Nichol, and CTO and co-founder, Ben Bromhead, are based in California.

Peter Nichol, CEO, Instaclustr, said: “We’re very excited about this investment as we move to our next growth phase. All the investors share our vision of the enormous potential for the technologies at the heart of addressing the challenges associated with data at scale. With experience across multiple Cloud and SaaS businesses, the investors bring a unique perspective, as well as a depth of expertise which we can draw on.

“The capital will be used to accelerate our growth with investment in two main areas – sales and marketing. We will put the necessary field sales resources in place in North America, Asia and Europe to increase our customer base. The second area will be in research and development, where we’ll be adding new features and capabilities to our technology. This will ensure we can add new customers at scale, expand revenue in existing accounts and develop our products.

“We will be doubling our team in Canberra next year, which is where we continue to keep our engineers and global technical support operations. Having our core team in Canberra is an efficient and effective strategy, and we have a great pool of engineering graduates coming into the business from the local universities that we train in to Cassandra specialists.”

Investor Quotes:

David Kirk, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, BTI

“We see a very big future for NoSQL databases and broader open-source data technologies, with an addressable market of more than $5bn. Instaclustr is a product-led company. It was clear through our due diligence that Instaclustr is the market leader, underpinned by a world-class team and deep expertise in this vertical. We are delighted to join them in building another hugely successful international Australian tech company.”

David Shein, Partner, Our Innovation Fund, LP

“Our Innovation Fund is a newly established early-stage technology fund founded by highly experienced business builders and serial entrepreneurs to partner with exceptional teams. We are pleased to be partnering with the Instaclustr team – they are visionary with an obsession for customer service.  One of the challenges for an Australian startup is to execute globally, but Instaclustr is already generating over 90 per cent of its revenues from outside of Australia and growing rapidly with outstanding clients.  Instaclustr is focussed on a massive global opportunity – managing Big Data as a service and are emerging as a world leader in this field.  We are proud to have them as part of our portfolio of Australian companies.”

Nick McNaughton, CEO ANU Connect Ventures

“Instaclustr is a pioneer in the ‘open source as a managed service’ space and we’re excited by the growth opportunities this new capital provides the company.”

 

For More Information please contact:

Doug Stuart
Instaclustr CMO
+61 418 787 732

Graham White
Howorth
+61 404 840 533



Other News
Read All
Spin up a cluster in minutes