Qualtrics, which offers online data collection and analysis software and services, has announced it is receiving an impressive $70 million in funding from top venture capital firms Accel Partners and Sequoia. Although the company has existed since 1997 and has been profitable since 2002, this is the first round of venture capital Qualtrics has ever received. The massive investment is also the largest that Accel and Sequoia has ever made together.

Qualtrics Growing Their Numbers by Analyzing the Numbers

Qualtrics has capitalized on the growing importance of data to run businesses. The platform, which begins at $2,500 per month, has over 4,000 customers across 75 countries, including hundreds of universities and half of the Fortune 100. According to Qualtrics, they have experienced triple-digit growth since 2008 – not bad for a company hardly anyone that’s not using has heard of it. However, Qualtrics is not finished growing. The company will use the cash infusion to more aggressively expand its business and increase its staff from 200 to 450.

Qualtrics has recently added two new products to its portfolio. The first product, Qualtrics 360, allows organizations to do employee evaluations. The second product, Site Intercept, extends the core platform with the ability to target website customers based on their behavior and gathers feedback that can be used to improve customer retention or increase conversion rates. Qualtrics is not the first company that Accel and Sequoia have teamed to partner. The pair also funded AdMob, a mobile ad platform acquired in 2009 by Google and Nimbula, which provides infrastructure software that allows companies to build Amazon EC2 style clouds.

Big Data, Big Investments

It seems that companies offering big data related services are the thing attracting investor attention these days. Accel Partners has even established a $100 million fund to finance early stage big data companies. Birst, a company that began a cloud-based business intelligence platform, announced it had received $26 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Hummer Winblad and DAG Ventures at the beginning of the month. Cloudera raised almost $40 million in November, MapR secured $25 million and 10Gen received $32 million. These companies are just a sample of the many big data related companies that are managing to acquire venture capital.

The big data market is still in a very embryonic state. There is an almost endless stream of vendors and products entering the market. Many of companies attracting million will not exist in a few years. However, data volumes are continuing to grow, and businesses are increasing realizing the potential of data to identify new market opportunities. This means there will be lots of demand and chances for new players experience success.