Metamarkets, the analytics start-up that wants to be the "Visicalc of Big Data," has gotten a $15 million B round led by new investor Khosla Ventures - Vinod was one of Sun's founders.

Existing backers IA Ventures, True Ventures, Village Ventures and AOL Ventures kicked in. AOL is a customer. Advertising don't you know

The new money brings total capital raised so far to $23 million. It's earmarked for product development and sales and marketing. It's pushing into social media and payment start-ups where the data is massive.

Metamarkets figures it delivers Data Science-as-a-Service and can make up for the 200,000 data scientists McKinsey reckons we'll be short over the next decade. Its solution is supposed to let non-experts filter, analyze and visualize Big Data and increase revenue.

According to Khosla, now a Metamarkets advisor, "Hadoop as a batch system is so last generation. It is time to move closer to real-time exploration of Big Data rather than the 70s mode of batch processing."

Not that the start-up doesn't use Hadoop. It's got a customized job called Data Pipes but the heart of its system is Druid, a distributed in-memory columnar data engine that's supposed to slice, dice and drill through data a thousand times faster than conventional disk-backed databases mixed with a JavaScript framework for interactive data visualizations, an out-of-the-box modeling framework that generates analytic insights without requiring a PhD and a cloud-based architecture for elastic scaling and lower TCO.

The widgetry is supposed to be a happy alternative to the DIY state of Big Data solutions.

The two-year-old start-up claims 100+ billion events ingested and processed per month; 100,000+ ad-hoc, multi-dimensional queries executed a day; 10+ TB of compressed, memory-mapped derived data and 500ms average query response time. CEO Michael Driscoll claims a dozen customers paying $10,000-$20,000 a month. Apparently Square is one of them.

The Metamarket solution is now available on the AWS Marketplace.

GigaOM says the start-up got a purchase offer from Twitter last year but evidently didn't offer enough to satisfy initial investors.

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