Hadean, the London-based software company, has managed to rake in $2.6 million in a seed funding round led by White Cloud Capital, along with Entrepreneur First also participating.
Founded by Rashid Mansoor (CEO) and Alec Mocatta (Chief Architect), Hadean claims to solve a crucial problem, one that many a startup has taken a swipe at. It is the issue of how to run complex algorithms on data without a lot of engineering resources and management required. With over 50% of the total amount of money currently being spent on Big Data processing, Hadean has swooped in with its own solution: breaking away from the use of software, and running algorithms at a huge scale requiring no engineering, directly over the command line.
Hadean’s claim to fame is its ability to enable a single developer to deploy and run code at any scale using their existing tool chain (Rust, C, Linux etc.), without requiring any of the ops or tuning you would usually associate with Big Data. They have essentially pioneered the re-engineering of the entire computing stack, upgrading the processing abilities of anyone with a laptop and internet access to supercomputer levels. If they have anything to do with it, it is now time for Spark, Hadoop and other cluster management software or solutions to fall by the wayside.
With Hadean, a single developer can log into the cloud-based platform and instantly run complex algorithms on data at any scale without the need to reach for any engineering resource or management.
Currently, the platform is still in beta testing stage, with a public release “later this year” in the pipeline. Even so, the company has already set up collaborations with a small number of customers in finance (a “big bank”) and a genomics research team (“sequencing genomes”). It is now time to settle down and wait until its release, to confirm whether they have succeeded in levelling the playing field for startups to compete against bigger corporations, by giving them the power to avoid the huge engineering costs required to get an algorithm to work on big data at scale.
