Turning raw data into useful information is only half the business intelligence journey.

Analytics teams must also share the results with their users on time and in an easily understandable format, which is much easier said than done when it comes to complex business or operational metrics. As a result, organizations are turning to providers such as OpenDataSoft, which has raised $5.4 million in funding from Aster Capital and Salesforce Ventures to fuel its work.

The Paris-based startup offers a managed data sharing platform that provides the ability to quickly pull information from a company’s internal systems and visualize it using pre-packaged graph templates. OpenDataSoft enables business professionals to turn their records into tables, charts, interactive images and even maps if they’re looking to uncover a geographic pattern such as a company’s sales performance in a given city. Moreover, its platform can be configured to automatically update a dashboard with new data that appears over time to keep the results up to date.

Once everything is properly set up, users are able to publish their visualizations to an online portal that OpenDataSoft says is accessible from both browsers and mobile devices. The startup’s platform also provides the option to generate programming interfaces for every dashboard to let third-party applications import its contents. A conference venue operator, for instance, could use the functionality to let advertising partners pull event attendance statistics into their infrastructure for analysis.

OpenDataSoft will use its newly raised funding to develop more features and step up go-to-market efforts. In particular, the startup plans to increase the headcount at its recently launched Boston sales, which is tasked with targeting the lucrative North American analytics market. The firm also intends to expand into more European nations such as Germany where demand for cloud-based data crunching is rising as well.

Image via OpenDataSoft