Ex-Vertica CEO turned big data angel turned Atlas Venture investor Chris Lynch has made his first investment as a VC. The company’s name is sqrrl, and it announced today that it has raised $2 million from Atlas and Matrix Partners.

sqrrl was founded by a team of ex-NSA big data experts and its products center around Apache Accumulo, an open source database designed by the NSA for big data projects.

“If we are going to deliver on the promise of the BIG in Big Data, the 80% of the Fortune 500 that is currently experimenting with solutions that don’t scale, are insecure, and bring 20 year-old ways to access and manipulate data to middling data sets need a better alternative,” said Antonio Rodriguez, general partner at Matrix Partners, in a release.

sqrrl hopes to make Accumulo workable for large enterprises. In addition to scalability, Accumulo offers the ability to regulate permissions down to the level of an individual piece of data, a useful feature for companies in sectors like finance and healthcare.

“The sqrrl team is an awesome group of people that knows Big Data and knows security,” said Lynch in the release. “I am excited to introduce them to the vibrant Massachusetts Big Data community as my first venture capital investment.”

According to The Globe‘s Scott Kirsner, the move from D.C., where the team had been operating, to Cambridge was a requirement for Lynch to invest. The team will work out of the hack/reduce big data working space, an initiative Lynch has championed. Both Lynch and Rodriguez will join sqrrl’s board.