Data analytics company Hadapt will hire up to 20 new employees over the next year after raising $9.5 million in new financing in a round led by Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. Three-quarters of the new hires will be for technical roles, with the balance made up of sales and business operations hires.
Hadapt's software runs on top of Hadoop, the popular open-source database that helps companies analyze and make sense of unstructured data like text in emails. Many companies currently operate two databases, Hadoop for unstructured data and a traditional database.
Hadapt's software combines the two database models, allowing greater efficiency and better insights, said Chief Executive Justin Borgman. The product also makes it easy for database veterans to use Hadoop without going through intensive new training, he said.
Founded in 2009 by a Yale computer science professor and Borgman, a Yale M.B.A., Hadapt currently has 15 employees. The company is moving from New Haven, Conn., to Cambridge, Mass., to attract the best talent from the city's computer science ecosystem, which is fueled by Harvard, MIT and database companies like Endeca. Endeca is being acquired by Oracle for as much as $1.07 billion.
"Systems and database engineers are not your average bears. Those people tend to live in Silicon Valley or Boston," Borgman, 31, said.
The company is looking for engineers with database internal experience, Java developers, and experience with distributed systems. Even the most sophisticated engineers contribute to both important and menial tasks, Borgman said. For instance, everyone loves to build new system features, but "dirty jobs" like building infrastructure for quality assurance is less popular. At Hadapt, engineers do both.
"We're like a special forces SEAL team," Borgman said. "It's a very small group and we all have to be qualified in a number of different areas and cross-functional, and able to act much larger than we are."
Hadapt's software is still beta testing, and will launch before the end 2011, Borgman said. Cash and equity compensation is competitive, he said.
Write to Joseph Walker at Joseph.Walker@dowjones.com
