While many tech startups are attracting less VC attention than they once did, analytics firm Lattice Engines has had few problems gaining adoration from investors.  The predictive analytics seller received $20 million in a Series C funding round.   New Enterprise Associates (NEA) led the round, and existing investor Sequoia Capital chipped in as well.

The San Mateo, CA-based Lattice sells predictive analytics software for marketers. Its flagship offering is salesPRISM, a platform that aggregates data streams and allows enterprises to get a feel for what their consumers are after. The company says that client organizations have managed to increase their pipeline by up to 75 percent, triple conversation rates and double cross-selling, all thanks to its technology.

“”The era of Big Data has arrived for sales and marketing,” said Shashi Upadhyay, CEO of Lattice. “By combining data from internal and external sources with high powered predictive analytics, our customers can predict buyer intent at an individual level, converting Big Data into big sales. Our customers are asking us for a comprehensive platform that can address all their analytical needs related to sales and marketing.”

New Enterprise Associations bought itself a stake in more than a few Silicon Valley success stories, including Box, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM and Workday. Lattice is hoping to become the first big data vendor on this list, and NEA general partner Pete Sonsini is joining its board to make sure that ends up happening.

Analytics is huge, and organizations – vendors, clients and VCs alike – are all willing to invest a lot of money to get in on the action.

Last week a company called WANdisco acquired AltoStor for $5 million, a startup co-founded by two of the original creators of Hadoop. It’s unclear whether this was mostly a talent buy or if WANdisco, a maker of clustering software, was after the technology. It’s likely a little bit of both.