Chartio, the Y Combinator startup that visualizes business information in the cloud, announced on Wednesday that it has bagged another $2.2 million from early-stage investor Avalon Ventures. The funding represents an important milestone for the firm, which has raised a total of $6.64 million to date and quadrupled in size since closing its first round of financing in 2011.

“The data industry is the one to watch in 2014, and we believe Chartio is the most powerful, seamless and easy-to-use solution in cloud business intelligence today,” commented Rich Levandov, a partner at Avalon Ventures. “As enterprises move even more applications to the cloud, we believe Chartio is the solution to bring data into the hands of everyday employees. We are excited to watch Chartio’s success in the coming year.”

Chartio will use the new capital to hire more workers, step up marketing efforts and get its services business off the ground. The recently established consultancy team focuses on helping customers drive additional value from the startup’s hosted dashboarding solution, which is pegged as a simpler and more cost-effective alternative to the monolithic business intelligence platforms offered by SAP and IBM.

The tool provides a drag and drop interface that enables users to pull in data from a wide range of sources, including on-premise Oracle deployments, AWS and as of August, Windows Azure and Microsoft SQL Server. The company is now making things even simpler with a new data integration capability that makes it possible to “blend” different types of information and find patterns that could not be discovered otherwise. The results can be fed into custom algorithms for more complicated operations such as predictive analytics, and the insights that come out on the other end may be displayed in a variety of formats.

Image source Chartio