REvolution Computing, the “RedHat” for the open source “R” statistical computing language, has received $9 million in Series B funding from North Bridge Venture Partners and Intel Capital. The company also announced that founder and former chairman of SPSS, Norman Nie, has been named CEO.
Founded in 2007, REvolution Computing sells products, including REvolution R and REvolution R Enterprise, that allow statisticians, scientists and others to create predictive models and and make sense of large sets of mission-critical data easily and quickly. The “R” statistical language has been growing growing in popularity as support increases in the open-source and academic communities.
This is a huge deal considering SAS provides a R interface in SAS/IML and appears to have clarified position just over a month ago on how SAS will work with (vs. against) R. The question for later down the road is how SAS views the outside investments and how their own customers draw into the two streams.
SAS is a fascinating company.
I wonder what the behind-the-scenes story is. The series B funding appears to be not without its shake-up. According to one former employee the plan is not altogether clear.
“47% of the company wiped out and nobody left with more than a year of experience”
[ref http://daneseco...s.com/divablog/
I’m interested in seeing what it looks like. I’ve always loved the flexibility of R but got tired of writing my own code from scratch all the time. I wonder if they will continue to treat it as open source in terms of having 3 party scripts for modeling.
You’ve missed out on a big part of the story – the major shakeup resulting in both the founders and the board being kicked out: http://daneseco...without-me.html