Business intelligence provider Birst is looking to kickstart its business with a relatively rare Series D round of funding as it looks to accelerate its recent shift into offering its solution as SaaS. This round was led by Sequoia Capital, which has been investing heavily in big data and analytics of late.

Birst is claiming that in the past year, it’s seen doubled revenues and grown its customer base by 40 percent, thanks to the launch of a dedicated SaaS BI appliance, an in-memory database offering specifically designed for analytics, a cloud-based mobile analytics SDK for the Apple iPad, and Hadoop support. Putting aside all of its own hype, Birst seems to be riding the cloud and big data waves both to big growth, especially since that the company claims a cost and time savings of two-thirds over the competition.

With this funding, Birst is looking to fund its growth as it expands into new markets, develops its products and services further, and gets into new markets. Series D funding usually indicates a pivot on the company’s part, but Birst has been in the BI game since 2005 – it really does seem like it’s really looking to build on a successful cloud business rather than turn away from its core model.

As I noted earlier, Sequoia has its fingers in a few other big data-related companies, including MongoDB NoSQL database sponsor 10gen and analytics service provider Mu Sigma. It seems that the VC sphere is seeing some real future in the ability to derive useful business insights from huge clumps of data, and the payoffs are starting to arrive.