Welcoming SlamData

At True, we look for visionary teams to invest in whom we believe will help create and lead new and emerging markets years from now—as opposed to simply attacking an already existing large market. This is exactly why we jumped at the chance to invest in SlamData, an open source solution that makes it easy for people to see and understand modern NoSQL data.

We are strong believers in the ecosystem around NoSQL and think that most modern workloads around IoT and mobile (for example) will live in this ecosystem. Just as with the first wave of relational databases, we think a whole new wave of analytics solutions will emerge to leverage the data. The first wave created several large companies in the space, and we think the next market opportunity could be even bigger.

Today, legacy visual analytics solutions cannot connect to modern NoSQL databases or make sense of NoSQL data, requiring cumbersome, brittle and complex ETL processes to transform the data to fit the traditional relational mold. SlamData, however, makes it easy for developers to see and understand modern NoSQL data, without relocating data or transforming it. SlamData’s high-level, cloud-deployable interface allows anyone to explore, refine and aggregate complex NoSQL data, and to build beautiful reports and visualizations that can be embedded in any web page, mobile app or web app. The technology is incredibly impressive, ambitious and not easy to duplicate, having been in development for over a year and a half.

What’s more, SlamData is entirely open source, which is a major investment theme here at True. SlamData joins our robust portfolio of close to 25 open source companies, including WordPress, Puppet Labs, npm, Hashicorp, 3D Robotics, OpenROV, Gradleware, Concurrent and more. Over 2,000 companies are already working with SlamData’s technology, and we’re thrilled that this investment continues our commitment to the rapid iteration and exponential growth that open source projects foster.

Most importantly, we are thrilled to back SlamData Co-Founders Jeff Carr and John De Goes, whom we have known for over two years and who have worked together for many years. Jeff has been in the enterprise technology market since 1987, initially working with leading companies like NCR and Oracle. Since leaving Netscape/AOL in 2001, Jeff has focused on building early stage companies in the security and analytics markets as an executive at Vericept, CipherTrust, Borderware and Precog. John taught himself programming when he was 8, and by age 13, he was writing and selling shareware. John spent his high school years writing best-selling books on 3D game programming and has co-founded several companies, including GameInstitute, N-Brain and Precog. He has deep expertise in distributed systems, big data, analytics, functional programming and user experience. We are incredibly excited to be working with this team.

Jeff and John: welcome to True!