Less than a year after its last funding round, Dataiku Inc. has nabbed $28 million in a new round led by Battery Ventures to establish a stronger position in the analytics market. 

The four-year-old startup offers a data science platform that prioritizes an often-overlooked aspect of business intelligence initiatives: collaboration. A typical project involves multiple staffers with different skill sets and technical knowledge, which can make it difficult to stay on the same page. 

Dataiku’s Data Studio aims to streamline team work by establishing an organized workflow. The platform relegates the first step, creating a prototype, to the business analysts who are usually tasked with executing core objectives in large-scale analytics projects. They can carry out their work using a straightforward visual interface that doesn’t require any coding. 

In the first stages of the project, ready-made connectors built into Data Studio make it easier to import the information necessary for a project. Drag-and-drop controls then enable business analysts to organize the files into a workable form. Dataiku claimed that the platform covers every major aspect of the process, from error removal to the task of filling in contextual gaps. 

Once the project has taken shape, analysts can hand over their work to the data scientists and developers in charge of delivering the final product. Data Studio packs programming tools that enable the latter group to augment a prototype model or business dashboard with custom features. That may be a set of tailor-made graphs or something more sophisticated such as a machine learning algorithm.

Dataiku said Data Studio’s capabilities lend themselves to a wide range of uses. Some companies employ the platform to predict changes in customer demand, while others are building supply chain analytics models. The startup claimed that Data Studio can also be used to power so-called predictive maintenance applications that rely on sensory data from industrial equipment to address potential issues in advance.

Dataiku will use the new funding to develop more analytics features. The startup plans to hire 100 new staffers in the coming months as part of the effort, as well as expand marketing efforts.

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