Another week, another business intelligence startup raising funds to tap the exploding demand for analytics. Looker Data Sciences Inc. this morning announced the completion of a $48 million investment round led by venture capital powerhouse Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) that will help finance its international expansion plans.

The push overseas is meant to boost the company’s already fast-growing revenue base, which quadrupled over the past year thanks to some 300 customer additions. Among the newcomers are technology majors such as Yahoo Inc., Intel Corp. and PayPal Holdings Inc. as well as a number of leading players from other key segments including the financial services industry. The common point of appeal is the data modelling language that powers Looker’s cloud-based analytics platform.

LookML makes it possible to encapsulate most of the boilerplate code needed to run a particular type of query in a template that can be reused for every supported request. That mechanism significantly reduces the amount of repetitive logic that analysts have to write and thereby kills two birds with one stone, improving project completion times while freeing up their time to focus on more productive tasks. The end result is that the line-of-business users who depend on that work receive the business insights they require faster.

The process is further accelerated by Looker’s query execution framework, which doesn’t carry out requests directly but rather passes on the work to the system in which the target information resides. Colin Zima, the startup’s top product executive, told SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier during an interview last year that performing the analysis locally makes it possible to exploit the advanced capabilities of modern databases in order to noticeably speed the task. The approach also removes the need to migrate files into its platform before every operation in the process, cutting the wait even more. 

Looker has been working to extend the benefits of the technology to a broader range of organizations as part of its growth efforts with features like embedded analytics for third party services and pre-implemented models designed to lower the adoption barrier. The new initiative to target international enterprises is a natural continuation of that strategy. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is sharing the bill for the expansion with Redpoint Ventures, Meritech and Sapphire Ventures, which also participated in the startup’s previous funding round last May. All told, it has raised $96 million to date.

Image via Looker