Another day, another investment by Ignition Partners. The Bellevue venture capital firm today announced that it has led a $14 million investment in Couchbase, a Mountain View, California-based NoSQL database company.
Yesterday, Ignition announced a $10 million round in New York cloud computing startup Apprenda, and word is that yet another deal is coming later this week.
Ignition’s pace of investment has been somewhat mind-numbing in recent weeks. And, as I’ve noted in the past, the firm appears to be positioning itself as more of a national player allying with top venture capital firms on deals in the Bay Area and East Coast.
By my count, Ignition has invested in a whopping 16 new companies so far this year. Of those, five are based in the Seattle area (Glympse, iTegris, Korrio, Swype and Tier 3).
The 11 Bay Area and New York bets include Bromium, BlueStacks, ScaleXtreme, Inporia, Zencoder, Topsy, Hipmunk, SocialEyes Motif Investing, Connected and Apprenda. (Note, these are just the “announced deals” that I’ve tracked so far this year, so there could very well be others in the pipeline).
Frank Artale, a newly-appointed member of the Ignition team, appears to be driving many of the new investment decisions. In fact, he’s quoted in the release on the Couchbase deal.
“Since Couchbase released its first NoSQL database products last October, their business has grown rapidly and they have emerged as the leader in the NoSQL database market,” said Artale, a former Microsoft manager.
Couchbase was formed earlier this year through the merger of CouchOne and Membase, formerly known as Northscale. Other investors in the company include Accel Partners, Mayfield Fund, and North Bridge Venture Partners.
