Operational analytics startup Census has closed a $60 million funding round that was led by Tiger Global with participation from Insight Partners, Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz.

Census, incorporated as Sutro Labs Inc., announced the Series B investment today. The startup will invest the funding in business growth initiatives and software development.

San Francisco-based Census provides what it describes as a reverse ETL platform. ETL, which stands for extract, transform, load, software is commonly used by companies to move business information into a centralized data warehouse for processing. Census’ platform performs the opposite task: It moves information from a company’s centralized data warehouse to other applications.

Organizations rely on Census’ technology to make business records available for employees in the applications that they use to carry out their day-to-day work. A retailer, for example, could send store sales logs from its data warehouse to the application that the marketing department uses to launch ad campaigns. Members of the marketing team could then consult the sales logs to determine what products to promote in the next ad campaign. 

Census says that its platform is also used in other areas. Product teams can leverage the startup’s platform to retrieve information on product adoption and user retention from their company’s data warehouse. Sales, customer success and support departments are also a focus for Census.

The process of sending information from a data warehouse to an external application can be highly complicated when there’s a large number of records to move. Census provides integrations for dozens of popular applications to simplify the task.

Furthermore, the startup promises to reduce the amount of time it takes to send data to applications. 

When a new set of records is added to a data warehouse, it’s often preferable to send the information to a company’s business applications as soon as possible. This allows workers to begin extracting insights from the information soon after it’s created. In practice, however, moving information between two different systems can take a significant amount of time.

Census uses an approach called incremental batch updates to speed up data transfers. When a company updates the information in its data warehouse, Census doesn’t sync all the information to the business applications used by workers, but only the new data that was added. The startup says that its platform can sync data 44 times faster than other reverse ETL tools.

A second benefit of transferring only newly added or modified records is that it saves bandwidth. For a large enterprises, the bandwidth costs associated with moving data between internal systems can be significant. Reducing the amount of information that has to be sent from the corporate data warehouse to other applications lowers network-related expenses. 

Census provides a set of features to help companies ensure that their data transfer workflows are operating reliably. The startup’s platform detects errors and automatically retries unsuccessful data transfers. For each error, Census generates a log with detailed technical information to help administrators carry out troubleshooting more easily. 

“The promise of operational analytics is to spread data across a company, expand the scope and impact of data teams and ultimately create a central nervous system for the whole business,” said Census co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Boris Jabes. “At Census, we believe that data teams should be in the critical path of every business operation.” 

Census says its platform is used by hundreds of companies, including many prominent players in the enterprise software market. The startup’s customer base includes Docker Inc., DigitalOcean Inc. and $4 billion productivity unicorn Mango Technologies Inc., better known as ClickUp. Another company using Census’ platform is Canva Pty Ltd., the graphic design startup that received a $40 billion valuation last year. 

Image: Census