Chances are that if programming is brought into an analytics discussion nowadays, the first language to come up will be R, the open-source statistical processing framework backed by Microsoft Corp. and decades of use in the academia. But a startup called Continuum Analytics Inc. has now armed itself with $24 million in funding to try and shift the spotlight towards Python, which is experiencing nothing short of a renaissance among data scientists.

That’s thanks in large part to the Austin-based outfit’s very own Anaconda toolkit, a free collection of some 330 libraries that augment the core syntax of the web-oriented language with advanced functions for analyzing and visualizing large datasets. The project received a $4 million grant from DARPA a few years ago and has taken off tremendously since.

Continuum boasts that Anaconda is now finding use at nearly half of the Fortune 500, among them PepsiCo Inc., The Boeing Company and other household names. That formidable private sector install base comes in addition to over 8,000 universities, and, not too surprisingly given DARPA’s early involvement, several key federal agencies. The combined tally easily positions the framework as the fastest-growing language in the data science world.

And that kind of growth in such a key segment of the market is simply irresistible for investors, appeal that Continuum has wasted no time exploiting. The $24  million raised as part of the round announced this morning will go towards boosting the adoption of Anaconda even further with more data processing features and increased marketing efforts.

The capital came from General Catalyst Partners, notable for backing a number of other analytics startups along with consumer success stories such as Airbnb Inc., and a relatively small growth-stage fund called BuildGroup. The investment brings Continuum’s total raised so far to a respectable $34 million.

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