Denodo Technologies Inc., a provider of data management software, today announced that it has raised $336 million from private equity firm TPG.

The transaction is described as a Series B investment. It included equity funding and a sale of secondary shares by HGGC, a private equity firm that became a Denodo investor in 2017. The companies stated that HGGC will remain a “significant” stakeholder following the Series B raise.

Denodo was launched in 1999 by founder and Chief Executive Officer Angel Viña, who was earlier a computer science professor at the University of A Coruñaf in Spain. The company sells a so-called data virtualization platform that makes it easier for organizations to analyze their business information. Autodesk Inc., Sanofi SA and Credit Suisse Group AG are among the customers that use the platform. 

In the enterprise, data is often scattered across multiple internal systems. That makes business records difficult to find and retrieve when they’re needed for an analytics project. Companies often tackle the challenge by moving their records into a centralized analytics environment, which can be a time-consuming and complicated process.

Denodo says its platform provides a simpler alternative. Instead of moving records from the systems where they’re usually stored into a centralized environment, the platform creates an inventory of which record is kept where. This inventory, or data catalog, allows users to find the information they need for their analytics projects quickly.

Denodo provides a built-in query engine for retrieving business records from systems where they’re stored. It can extract information from more than 200 sources including cloud databases, data warehouses and software-as-a-service applications. 

According to Denodo, its query engine uses artificial intelligence to speed up data retrieval. The built-in AI automatically rewrites users’ queries to improve their performance.

The platform further improves response times using an approach known as materialization. Using the technique, administrators can save the results of a query that business users run frequently. The next time a user runs that query, Denodo can simply fetch the pre-prepared results instead of calculating them from scratch, which saves time. 

Denodo allows users to export data to third-party tools such as Tableau for analysis. According to the company, its platform can also help simplify AI projects. Machine learning developers can use the platform to quickly find the internal datasets they need to train a new AI model or perform inference. 

Last March, Denodo disclosed that its subscription sales grew by more than 50% year-over-year in 2021. The company detailed at the time that software subscriptions account for nearly all its revenue. 

“Denodo’s unique data virtualization software, which allows enterprises to create unified views of disparate data sources that can be queried easily without moving them, has powered impressive, profitable growth,” said TPG partner Mike Zappert.

Denodo expects TPG’s newly announced $336 million investment to be finalized early next month. The company hinted that it plans to use the capital to expand its international market presence. Last March, Denodo disclosed that it had 25 offices in 20 countries.

Image: Denodo