Hortonworks, Inc

Hortonworks is a big data software company based in Santa Clara, California. The company develops and supports Apache Hadoop, for the distributed processing of large data sets across computer clusters. Hortonworks was formed in June 2011 as an independent company, funded by $23 million venture capital from Yahoo! and Benchmark Capital. Its first office was in Sunnyvale, California. The company employs contributors to the open source software project Apache Hadoop. The Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) product includes Apache Hadoop and is used for storing, processing, and analyzing large volumes of data. The platform is designed to deal with data from many sources and formats. The platform includes Hadoop technology such as the Hadoop Distributed File System, MapReduce, Pig, Hive, HBase and Zookeeper and additional components. Eric Baldeschweiler (from Yahoo) was initial chief executive, and Rob Bearden chief operating officer, formerly from SpringSource. Benchmark partner Peter Fenton was a board member.The company name refers to the character Horton the Elephant, since the elephant is the symbol for Hadoop. Additional investors included a $25 million round led by Index Ventures in November 2011.