Metamarkets, a San Francisco startup providing streaming analytics to advertisers, has raised a $15 million round of venture capital. Data Collective led the round, which also included John Battelle and City National Bank and existing investors Khosla Ventures, IA Ventures, True Ventures and Village Ventures. Metamarkets (see disclosure) has now raised more than $43 million since launching in 2010.
While the company’s product, like most software as a service, is tied to a rather specific use case, its technology is not. To many engineers working on big data systems, Metamarkets is also known as the creator of Druid, an open source data store the company created in order to handle the speed and scale its analytics platform requires. Last week, Metamarkets announced that Druid is now available under the permissive Apache 2 open source license.
Metamarkets CEO Mike Driscoll has a clear view of where the software world is headed, and he thinks his company is one of many helping take it there. Essentially, it’s a world where applications are delivered as cloud services, and infrastructure technologies become commodities, often created and then open sourced by the companies building those applications.
If you look at the technology landscape today, it’s hard to argue with that premise. Large companies such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo have created a large number of today’s popular data analysis, data storage, programming and other technologies, and now Metamarkets, Airbnb, Twitter and others are getting in on the act. It’s not wholly inconceivable that future developers, even at the enterprise level will be able to find anything they need as open source, meaning money only has to change hands for services, support and, of course, applications.
Disclosure: Metamarkets is a portfolio company of True Ventures, which is also an investor in Gigaom.
