NGDATA Raises Capital

NGDATA (Zwijnaarde, Ghent, Belgium) has announced that the company will raise capital to accelerate its growth activities in the United States and continue investments in the development of its big data management platform. NGDATA enables organizations to obtain real-time business insights based on large amounts of data gathered from their audiences. These valuable insights are used to make quick and efficient decisions and improve business performance.

NGDATA, founded by seasoned entrepreneurs Luc Burgelman, Frank Hamerlinck, Steven Noels and Jürgen Ingels, recently acquired Outerthought, a Belgium-based company with a strong track-record in big data technology. This acquisition is a first step in NGDATA’s goal to become a major player in the big data solutions industry.

Big Data, Big Business

Market studies show that the future success of companies will depend on their ability to capture, analyze and gain insights from their audiences. Companies want to capitalize on the massive amounts and more complex sets of data they can gather to inform and facilitate fast decision-making. Using big data will help to better understand customer behaviors and get much more accurate insights. This allows companies to execute targeted actions, such as personalized advertising, detection of fraud, one-to-one marketing, etc.

NGDATA targets consumer-facing industries as a big data software provider and is now seeking to secure capital to fuel the company’s continued growth. The additional funds will be used to accelerate the development and roll-out of the product roadmap and support business development activities in the United States.

Key to NGDATA’s growth strategy is the further development of ‘Lily’, a big data management platform. Lily is set to revolutionize the way companies aggregate vast amounts of data, extract business insights and use this enriched data to impact business operations. Lily provides a user-friendly interface and machine learning engine to easily manage extensive data and quickly obtain powerful insights to generate real-time recommendations and improve business performance.

“Our unique big data management platform is the result of significant R&D investments and demonstrates NGDATA’s commitment to develop technologies that have a tremendous positive impact for our customers and partners,” said Luc Burgelman, Chief Executive Officer of NGDATA. “We want to secure additional capital to expand our technology lead, increase customer adoption and accelerate our business development efforts.”

Experienced management and investors to drive growth

Driving this business growth are founders and private investors Luc Burgelman, Frank Hamerlinck, Steven Noels and Jürgen Ingels who bring a wealth of combined experience to NGDATA. While Ingels will have an advising role, both Burgelman and Hamerlinck take on an active role in the senior management of NGDATA as CEO and COO. They are joined by Outerthought founder Steven Noels who remains at the forefront of NGDATA as VP Product. Over the past few years, Noels has steered Outerthought towards an established position in the big data market.

Luc Burgelman and Frank Hamerlinck were co-founders, CEO and COO/CTO respectively, of Porthus which went public in 2006 and was acquired by Descartes Systems Group in March 2011. Luc Burgelman was EVP Global Marketing and Product Strategy at Descartes and currently holds board positions at multiple technology companies. Frank Hamerlinck held the position of EVP Global R&D at Descartes. Prior to Porthus Hamerlinck held management positions at VolvoIT. Jürgen Ingels is founder and CFO of Clear2Pay. Previously, Ingels worked at Dexia Bank. He is a board member of different technology companies and investment funds and co-president of the French & Benelux Tech Tour which will be held in May.

With the acquisition of Outerthought, NGDATA now has a solid foundation to further execute its business plan and growth strategy. Securing extra funding will accelerate the implementation of the strategy.

About NGDATA

NGDATA brings big data technology and machine intelligence together, allowing organizations to capitalize on the massive amounts of data that is generated today. NGDATA develops Lily, a big data management platform that offers an easy way to extract powerful business insights in real-time and benefit from enriched data to make an immediate impact on business performance. NGDATA’s global partner community provides expert services best suited to meet evolving big data needs. NGDATA is a privately-held company with headquarters in Ghent, Belgium. More information and recent updates are available at www.ngdata.com.

About Lily

NGDATA develops Lily, a big data management platform that offers an easy and scalable way to extract real-time data and gain business insights. Lily enables the management of big data, providing analytically enriched guidance through smart data management, indexing, search, profile harvesting and interactive audience metrics. While based on Apache Hadoop, HBase and SOLR* technology, Lily focuses on the customer’s specific needs with a user-friendly interface to easily manage extensive data assets to quickly obtain powerful insights and key trends to impact decision making and improve business performance. Meet Lily • http://www.lilyproject.org.

Source: NGDATA