German analytics tools company Rapid-I announced today that it had raised USD5 million in Series A investment. The investment round was led by Earlybird Venture Capital and Open Ocean. Open Ocean is an investment firm that is backed by MySQL founders.

The investment round also marked the appointment of former Yahoo chief data officer Usama Fayyad to the company board and the rebranding of the company's name to RapidMiner.

Open Ocean Capitala and MySQL founder Monty Widenius said in his statement, "With three million product downloads, RapidMiner has rapidly become one of the leaders in the predictive analytics space. We plan to leverage our experience in building MySQL, and the MySQL community, to help the RapidMiner team advance its technology and grow its user community around the world."

Rapid-I, with its new headquarters at Boston, Massachusetts, would use the new funds to step up its growth in the predictive analytics market.