Earlybird backs RapidMiner

Ellie Pullen
04 November 2013

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Earlybird Venture Capital and Open Ocean Capital have co-led a $5m series-A funding round for RapidMiner, a German provider of a predictive analytics platform.

The fresh capital will be used by RapidMiner to further develop and expand its sales and marketing operations both domestically and internationally. The company will also begin development of new products for its enterprise-focused predictive analytics product base.

In conjunction with the series-A round, RapidMiner has opened US headquarters in Boston. Former Yahoo chief data officer Usama Fayyad has also joined the company's board of directors.

The company has additionally completed a corporate rebranding by launching a new website and renaming itself to match its flagship product, RapidMiner – the business was formerly known as Rapid-I.

Open Ocean is a Finland-based venture capital firm focused on investing in European software start-ups. The firm was set up by the founders of MySQL, an open-source database management system acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008.

Open Ocean was originally established as a Luxembourg-based holding company for the founders' shareholding in MySQL, but became a venture capital firm with a Finnish base following the sale of MySQL. The firm typically invests an initial €750,000-1m per transaction and can invest up to €7m in a portfolio company. According to Open Ocean's website, the firm is currently investing from its €45m Fund Three.

Company
Founded in 2007, RapidMiner has bases in Dortmund, Germany; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Sunnyvale, California. The company was formerly named Rapid-I and began as a spinout from the Artificial Intelligence Unit at the Dortmund University of Technology. The business now employs 40 staff.

RapidMiner provides a suite of predictive analytics products for business analysts, including operational dashboards, metrics and performance reports. The company's platform integrates with existing IT infrastructures and provides a drag-and-drop interface to users for the creation of analytics processes, which means that it requires no programming.

According to Earlybird, RapidMiner's sales have increased five-fold since 2011. The company has a paying customer base of more than 400. Customers include Lufthansa, PayPal, Pepsi, Volkswagen, Siemens and Sanofi.

People
Ingo Mierswa is the founder and CEO of RapidMiner. Earlybird partner Jason Whitmire and Open Ocean managing partner Patrik Backman have joined the company's board of directors.