StartX gets its talons out

Stanford StartX Fund has been named as one of the backers into data management firm BlueTalon’s $5m series A.

The uncapped university venturing fund was joined by fellow new backers Signia Venture Partners, Biosys Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Divergent Ventures, and Berggruen Holdings, as well as existing backer Data Collective.

The latest round brings BlueTalon’s total funding to $6.5m after a $1.5m seed round with Data Collective as the sole investor.

At the same time, US-based BlueTalon launched its BlueTalon Policy Engine, a data entitlement solution for Hadoop. Hadoop is a set of algorithms written for distributed storage of big data. Despite rising popularity, Hadoop has been hindered in terms of data entitlement and security – an issue which BlueTalon is looking to fix.

Eric Tilenius, CEO of BlueTalon, said: “The value and growth of Hadoop is being driven by its economies of scale, but it now requires enterprise-scale entitlement and fine-grained access security to maintain this growth, extend its value and deliver on its potential. BlueTalon’s Policy Engine is the missing link for delivering enterprise Hadoop in production environments for even the most sensitive data. The launch of this breakthrough technology, funding from a who’s who of investors, and the recognition at Strata + Hadoop World as a company to watch, are all major milestones for our company and the Hadoop market.”