UPDATED 09:00 EDT / MARCH 30 2017

BIG DATA

Business intelligence hotshot Looker rakes in another big pile of cash

Hot business intelligence startup Looker Data Sciences Inc. has closed an $81.5 million Series D funding round, adding CapitalG, the late-stage venture capital fund run by Google’s Alphabet parent, to its growing roster of investors.

The latest infusion brings Looker’s total funding to $177.5 million, with nearly $130 million of that raised since the first of last year. Other new investors in this round include Geodesic Capital and Goldman Sachs. They join a blue-chip list of prior investors that includes Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Redpoint Ventures and Sapphire Ventures.

Looker said it will use the money for product development, expanded database integration, sales and marketing investments and international expansion, particularly in Asia.

The company has been breaking out of a crowded business intelligence market with its pitch of eliminating painful data extraction processes by automating SQL database queries to pull in data directly from multiple sources and make it easy to embed its visualizations in other platforms. It has benefited from some recent missteps by competitor Tableau Software Inc., which is still recovering from a series of earning misses and has struggled to shift from a software license to a cloud-based subscription model.

Looker completely overhauled its core platform last October with a modular architecture that includes a collection of reusable analytics templates and a dozen full-blown applications for common analytics tasks. The company said its 2016 revenue nearly tripled as it signed 400 new customers. It claims that its more than 40,000 end-users spend an average of 12.5 hours with the product each month. The company also grew its employee rolls by 50 percent to more than 300 and recently opened a European headquarters.

In an interview on SiliconANGLE’s mobile video studio theCUBE at the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. Big Data Conference last August, Keenan Rice, Looker’s vice president of alliances and channels, said the company’s cloud-native story is catching fire. “We are at the right time and the right place with the right idea,” he said. “The idea of storing as much data as possible, getting it all together and then figuring out what to do with it is an opportunity that we rode on.”

Here’s the full interview:

Image: Looker

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