No-code cloud analytics and business intelligence firm Sigma Computing Inc. has closed on what may well be one of the last big funding rounds of 2021, raising $300 million in the process.

Today’s Series C funding round was co-led by D1 Capital Partners and XN, with participation from existing investors Sutter Hill Ventures and Altimeter Capital, plus new investors Snowflake Ventures. The round brings Sigma’s total amount raised to date to $381.3 million.

It comes as no surprise that Sigma managed to persuade Snowflake Inc. to back it through its venture capital arm. That’s because Sigma, which was founded in 2014, is designed to meet the needs of analysts who work with spreadsheets and also want to use real-time data stored in Snowflake’s cloud data warehouse. Sigma’s tools make it possible for anyone to query Snowflake data and view the results of those queries through easy-to-consume visualizations.

Sigma offers what it calls a “unified collaborative canvas” that combines spreadsheets with charts and narratives. It keeps all data projects synchronized in a single, self-contained platform. With it, users can drill down into their data and calculate any inquiry against billions of rows of live data without the need to write queries in Structured Query Language. With no coding skills required, any users can answer any question of their data immediately, without going through a specialist BI team.

Sigma competes against tools such as Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Tableau and Looker, but it benefits to an extent from being a “Snowflake Elite Partner.” Still growing, it currently claims 220 customers, including the food distributor U.S. Foods Holding Corp., the alternative asset manager Blackstone Inc and health tech firm Athenahealth.

U.S. Foods said that by implementing Sigma’s Workbooks platform, it has been able to respond to customers more quickly, approve transactions, increase its supply chain efficiency and more.

“As a leading foodservice distributor, partnering with approximately 300,000 restaurants and foodservice operators, being able to quickly manage service levels across our customer base is fundamental to meeting our client obligations,” said Chuck Sample, U.S. Foods’ vice president of analytics and data science. “With Sigma, we have been able to significantly reduce the time it takes to garner insights on the fly while allowing both the business and BI teams to function at a higher level.”

Sigma co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Rob Woolen said the company’s mission is to remove the costly bottleneck that arises from having to work in code to query large data warehouses and squeeze valuable business intelligence from them.

“Overcoming these technical challenges with accessible no-code Workbooks met that promise, easing processes for large organizations and allowing decision-makers to pull insights directly in real-time while also making this technology accessible and scalable for anyone to use,” he said.

Sutter Hill Ventures Managing Director Mike Speiser said he invested in Sigma because it has reimagined BI from the ground up.

“Sigma’s product is extraordinary, as is the team that built it,” he said. “If you can use a spreadsheet, you can now use a cloud data warehouse like a professional.”

Image: Sigma Computing