Maureen O'Gara

Samsung Ventures has made an undisclosed strategic investment in Boston-based Cloudant and its NoSQL database managed service joining the CIA through its venture arm In-Q-Tel as another hush-hush backer of the four-year-old start-up.

The move comes within hours of Samsung saying it wants to put a lot more money in early stage companies and fundamental research and announcing a $100 million Samsung Catalyst Fund for components and subsystems start-ups. The company's venture arm already has a billion dollars to play with, with more forthcoming as needed.

Cloudant says the money will be used for R&D "to further improve global data distribution technologies and mobile application data management."

It allows that global data distribution, mobile replication and synchronization, expert monitoring, and scalable performance are key features demanded by government agencies, enterprise customers and SMBs, particularly as mobile devices and data proliferate

Samsung, of course, has a vested interest in smartphones and tablets and is looking to Cloudant to push into the large enterprise.

Hyuk-Jeen Suh, a senior investment manager with Samsung Ventures America, said in a statement that "We felt that this is the right time to strategically invest in Cloudant to support the company's vision to manage the proliferation of data to be created by, for example, mobile devices, machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies, and the ‘Internet of things' in the future."

Cloudant, which has also gotten money from Avalon Ventures and Y Combinator, can distribute application data across a global network of highly secure, high-performance data centers providing its customers with non-stop data access at low-latency thanks to the cloud. Disclosed investments amount to a mere $4 million.

The company's Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) works on Amazon, Rackspace, Joyent, Azure and SoftLayer.