Startup Cube Dev Inc. has raised $25 million from investors to enhance its semantic layer platform, which enables enterprise to analyze their data more efficiently.

The raise, which was announced today, saw the participation of returning backers Decibel, Bain Capital Ventures, Eniac Ventures and 645 Ventures. New investor Databricks Ventures led the round. The capital infusion brings Cube’s total outside funding to $48 million.

“This funding will pave the way for us to help more companies bring consistency, context, and trust to all their analytics,” said Cube co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Artyom Keydunov.

Companies’ business data is often scattered across multiple systems, which makes the information difficult to analyze. One of the main challenges is that each system makes data accessible through a different application programming interface. That means developers working on analytics projects must familiarize themselves with multiple APIs, which complicates their work.

Another issue stems from the fact that different systems store data in different ways.

A retailer’s MySQL sales database may keep customer purchase logs in a format that displays the day, month and year when each transaction took place. The same company’s cloud data warehouse, meanwhile, might only store the month and year when transactions took place without displaying the exact day. Such formatting inconsistencies make it difficult, and in some cases impossible, for analytics tools to reliably ingest information.

Cube’s semantic layer platform promises to address those challenges. The platform is capable of organizing information from a company’s databases and other systems into a single, consistent format that can be easily ingested by analytics tools. After organizing the data, Cube makes it accessible through a centralized API that removes the need for developers to learn multiple systems’ programming interfaces.

In some cases, merely changing the way data points are formatted isn’t sufficient to facilitate analysis. Developers often have to enrich the information with additional details from external sources. In other cases, they have to simplify the data. For example, 100 database fields that each log the dollar value of a customer purchase might be replaced with a single field containing the average price of those purchases.

The platform allows developers to perform calculations on business information via an API. Additionally, the platform includes an in-memory cache that can save the results of frequently-repeated calculations. This removes the need to perform those computations from scratch every time, which saves infrastructure resources and thereby cuts costs.

Cube provides its platform under an open-source license. It also sells a commercial version, Cube Cloud, that adds an auto-scaling feature and other tools designed to reduce the amount of work involved in using the software. The company disclosed today that its customer base quadrupled over the past year while the average deal size tripled.

The company will use the proceeds from the round to expand its go-to-market efforts. It will also develop new capabilities for its platform. It detailed that some of the feature additions will enable developers to carry out more complicated calculations on their data, while others are set to reduce the amount of custom code required for analytics projects.

Image: Cube