Congratulating Cetas

We are pleased to share the news that True company Cetas has been acquired by VMware. We invested in Cetas in December 2010 at the company’s formation, and we could not be happier for the team’s success.

I first met Cetas Co-Founder and CEO Muddu Sudhakar through Ted Wang at Fenwick & West LLP. Ted is a close friend of ours at True, and he has a great nose for talent. I was immediately impressed by Muddu’s vision to build a real-time platform for the analysis and management of unstructured data. Across our portfolio, several of our web-scale companies were beginning to face new challenges and opportunities from their engagement and application data. Big Data emerged as a marketplace as we all recognized the potential to not just manage this new data, but also to analyze customer- and machine-generated data to gain insights into customer behavior, and use this understanding to tailor product offerings to meet subsets of customers and predict future demand trends—and do all of this in very short timeframes.

It became very apparent to us that the existing web infrastructure was ill suited to handle the full-time, event-driven connections of the social (and later mobile) web. Beginning in 2007, we at True expanded our investments in the SaaS and infrastructure segments of the market. We saw the opportunity for the next wave of infrastructure and business application software products and put our dollars behind this vision. Today, over 60% of all our capital is invested in SaaS and infrastructure. We believe this is one of the next great investment waves of our time.

Specific to Cetas, Muddu’s and Christos’ vision for a scalable and algorithm-rich platform that could detect and prove correlations across an unstructured flow of data in real-time was a compelling one. We loved Muddu as a founder—he had previous success building data analytics products, and he had an acute sense of the market opportunity and product requirements. He was also the proverbial entrepreneur with his “hair on fire.” It was clear that the Cetas train was leaving the station, and we were all too thrilled to be a part of the ride.

Cetas assembled an incredible team, built a powerful platform, and attracted several world-class customers very quickly. They also attracted the savvy attention of our friends at VMware. While Cetas was well on their way to building something very large, we are pleased with their decision to join VMware, who has been a great partner to True with their acquisition of Socialcast in 2011.

We look forward to seeing the enormous impact that Muddu, Christos and the team at VMWare make together in this exciting category. Congratulations Muddu, Christos and team, and thank you for all of your tremendous efforts to build Cetas into such a success.