Venture capitalist firm Accel has announced that it is putting aside $100m (£60m) to invest in big data application start-up companies.

The company revealed its plans at this week’s Hadoop World Conference yesterday, also revealing that it has already invested $40m into the field.

It will have the creator of the Apache Hadoop platform – which a large proportion of the early big data applications are being built upon – advising it on how to spend the money, as well as leading names from the likes of Facebook and bitly.

Big data refers to the process of taking extremely large amounts of small data which would otherwise be lost and using it intelligently for added value to the business. A good example is the endless supply of data generated through social media.

Apache’s Hadoop platform is essentially a free license database tool which can support applications processing these huge amounts of data.

As well as funding new entrants to the market, “focussing on transformative early stage and growth companies,” Accel is intending to hold a big data conference in San Francisco in the Spring.

The company said: "We believe the future multi-billion software companies will emerge from the big data ecosystem."

Cloud is being seen as an important tool in the use of big data applications, due to the vast spikes in the computing power needed for projects.