During funding negotiations, the ball is usually in the court of the startup at the receiving end of the transaction. But in the case of AtScale Inc.’s latest financing round, it was investors who came knocking on the door to buy a stake, according to founder and chief executive Dave Mariani. The firm announced today that it’s raised $11 million as part of the cash infusion from nearly half a dozen backers including Comcast Corp.’s private equity arm.

The move comes less than a year after the carrier started using AtScale’s business intelligence software, which harnesses the capabilities of Hadoop for multidimensional analytics that are not supported natively. A built-in designer provides the ability to consolidate a company’s disparate records into OLAP cubes that can be parsed as a single unit, and then make the data available for processing through a third party tool like QlikView. Thanks to some nifty technology that the startup included under the hood, users are able to take advantage of the latter integration without physically moving their records out of Hadoop, which provides a couple of major benefits.

First, it eliminates the considerable bandwidth cost of regularly shuffling data back and forth between the platform and an external BI tool. And second, the feature avoids the delay associated with the process. For large organizations like Comcast with upwards of petabytes of information in their Hadoop environments, that can add up to a lot of saved time over the course of the average workday. As a result, analysts become more productive and the decision-makers who rely on their work end up receiving access to important business insights faster.

AtScale claims to have increased its revenue fivefold last year with this sales pitch. The new funding will enable the startup to expand customer acquisition efforts even further and develop new features for its software in conjunction. The push should go a long way towards leveling the playing field against better-established business intelligence vendors like Platfora Inc. that have also incorporated Hadoop into their software.

Image via AtScale