Stealthy data startup Jut announced last week it has secured $20 million in series B financing. This is an interesting company to watch with an experienced management and investment team.

The round was led by Accel Partners with participation from LightSpeed Venture Partners and Wing.  CEO Steve McCanne leads the Jut team — he is a former Co-Founder of Riverbed Technology, a company that pioneered WAN-optimization technology, which makes newtorking more efficient in their used of bandwidth. Riverbed, which was also funded by Accel, went public in 2006 and most recently had a market cap of $2.7B.

Accel has most recently been known for its huge score in Facebook. But the Accel team also a deep understanding of cloud computing and data and some of its other successes in that market include Cloudera and Dropbox.

The Jut team also includes Larry Castro, CFO; Mike Demmer, VP Engineering; Apurva Dave, VP Marketing. I have also heard through the social-media grapevine that Eric Wolford, former President of Riverbed’s executive management team, is involved on some level. 

Clearly, with McCanne at the helm, the connections between Jut and Riverbed run deep. Jut officials say they are still in “stealth” mode, so they aren’t giving a lot of information about their plan, but they are saying that they have “built an ambitious vision around the future of big data applications.”

“It’s now clear that open source big data is radically changing the way information infrastructure is architected for scale and cost, but the real opportunity lies in rethinking how enterprise applications are architected so they can make sense out of the massive volumes of big data,” said McCanne in a company press release, which can be read here.  

By the looks of some of the stuff on Jut’s corporate blog, the company is looking at ways to capture and analyze corporate data.  For some background on this you might want to look at what I wote about Cloud Physics. 

The company says it will be using the capital to expand its engineering team and bring the first version of its product to market.