It’s nice to be cool, particularly when the folks naming you cool are none other than the esteemed team at Gartner. It is why we are so excited that Gartner chose MapD as a Cool Vendor in DBMS.

At MapD our goal is to build the world’s fastest big data analytics and visualization platform that enables lag-free interactive exploration of multi-billion row datasets. MapD supports standard SQL queries as well as a visualization API that maps OpenGL primitives onto SQL result sets.

A few years back, the American Statistical Association put out a dataset of hundreds of millions of US airline flights from 1987 to 2008, as part of a supercomputing competition. The dataset includes every single flight record known by Bureau of Transportation Statistics for that two decade period; every prop plane, every jet plane, balloon or blimp.

It is with great pleasure that we today announce two significant milestones for our company: the general availability of our GPU-powered database and visual analytics software platform, and the closing of a $10M Series A round led by Vanedge Capital with participation from Verizon Ventures and Nvidia, joining earlier investor GV (formerly Google Ventures).

While we love datasets of all shapes and sizes at MapD, Twitter holds a special place in our hearts. This is perhaps because we find Twitter data to be almost peerless among public datasets in its ability to provide a glimpse into the human experience - revealing what people are saying when and where.