Cloudant's service provides integrated data management, search, and analytics engine designed for web applications.

In early 2008 their ideas for fixing the "big data problem" caught the attention of Silicon Valley–based Y Combinator, which resulted in $20,000 seed funding.

The company also received an early seed round of $1 million from Avalon Ventures in August 2010.

Cloudant was designed for cloud computing, automatically distributing data across multiple servers in addition to scaling the database to accommodate web applications.

The acquisition closed in March, after which Cloudant joined IBM's Information and Analytics Group.