Unveiling In-Q-Tel

Today we are pleased to announce that In-Q-Tel, the non-profit strategic investor that identifies innovative technology for the U.S. Intelligence Community, participated in our previously announced Series A round.

IQT joins previously announced investors GV (formerly Google Ventures), Nvidia, Vanedge Capital, and Verizon Ventures.

Needless to say, we are delighted to be able to publicly announce IQT’s participation. IQT has established itself as one of the savviest investors in Silicon Valley and has been instrumental in building companies for close to two decades at this point. IQT’s investment thesis is quite broad, investing in companies that can add value to the intelligence community within 36 months. This broad filter has resulted in a range of investments from Palantir, Keyhole (now Google Earth) and Cloudera to name but a few.

IQT approach is designed to accelerate product development and add mission-critical capabilities with the sole purpose of delivering cutting-edge technologies quickly and efficiently to their client base. We are currently in what IQT identifies as the “work program” phase where we adapt, extend and deliver our software to an IQT client.

The client and customizations are not disclosed.

The IQT investment is a powerful validation for our approach to GPU computing as it relates to database acceleration and visual/geospatial analytics.. IQT is looking for products and companies that are ready for market and can add value to their client base quickly. Further, they conduct extensive diligence to ensure that readiness.

To borrow from the press release:

“MapD is one of the newly emerging software companies leveraging advanced GPU hardware to deliver very impressive performance improvements in data visualization and data exploration,” said George Hoyem, Managing Partner, Investments, IQT. “The ability to interact with and visualize billions of data elements in real-time is a transformative capability for our national security partners.”

IQT’s investment also underscores the massive shift to GPUs that we are seeing in the marketplace. From IBM’s leadership to Amazon’s ground shaking P2 announcement the compute world is increasingly GPU-centric for everything from deep-learning to databases.

No matter what the application, the story is really about speed at scale.

The question every organization is asking today is, “how do I deliver millisecond latency in the Petabyte economy?” The answer is not CPUs - no matter how elastic the approach. Adding hundreds of CPU instances drives up complexity, cooling costs, power costs, license costs while delivering diminishing marginal returns.

The other approaches: waiting, downsampling, indexing all have significant implications that undermine an organization's ability to be data-driven.

When you pair fast hardware from Nvidia with fast software these challenges are drastically reduced. With fast hardware and fast software querying and rendering billions of records occurs in milliseconds- allowing an organization work with far larger datasets in real-time. This is critical at a time when the average working set has ballooned to hundreds of millions if not billions of records.

We are pleased to put our technology to work for the US Government and are delighted to have IQT guiding us on this journey.