MapD Technologies unveils strategic investment from In-Q-Tel

MapD of San Francisco, CA announced on October 19 that In-Q-Tel, Inc. (IQT), the nonprofit strategic investor that identifies innovative technology for the U.S. Intelligence Community, participated in the company’s Series A round. IQT joins previously announced investors GV (formerly Google Ventures), Nvidia, Vanedge Capital, and Verizon Wireless.

Under the terms of the agreement, MapD and IQT will collaborate on the acceleration of certain features of MapD’s GPU-powered database and visualization platform. MapD’s software is purpose built for the parallel processing power of GPUs and delivers speedups of 75 to 1,000 times over traditional databases. By leveraging the rendering capabilities of the graphics processor, MapD can also visualize billions of rows of data in milliseconds, orders of magnitude faster than the current state of the art.

“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.”

“CPU-bound database and analytics systems have struggled to keep pace with the massive growth in data — severely limiting the insights that can be extracted from an organization’s informational assets,” said Todd Mostak, CEO and co-founder at MapD. “The investment by IQT validates our pioneering approach of using GPUs to power insight discovery across billion-plus row datasets. This partnership represents an exceptional opportunity to extend our leadership position in the area of analytics.”

Source: MapD