UPDATED 10:01 EDT / MARCH 11 2015

NEWS

SaaS business intelligence startup Looker raises $30 million Series B

lookerSoftware as a Service (SaaS) business intelligence startup Looker Data Sciences Inc. (Looker) has raised $30 million Series B in a round led by Meritech Capital Partners that included Sapphire Ventures, and previous investors Redpoint Ventures, First Round Capital and PivotNorth.

Based in Santa Cruz, CA, Looker offers a browser-based development environment for business intelligence. The service is built on the proprietary language LookML, a platform that allows analysts to create and curate custom data experiences that any employee can explore to utilize the data that’s most relevant to them.

Looker integrates with Amazon Redshift, Teradata Aster, HP Vertica, Greenplum, Impala, Bigquery and Spark, among others.

The company says it experienced 400 percent growth in 2014, and now has in excess of 250 customers, including Yahoo!, Warby Parker, Asana, Instacart, Docker, Venmo, Upworthy, and Gilt.

“Looker’s game-changing SaaS platform, which gives unprecedented access to business users in any department, combined with its accelerated growth and broad customer list, makes the company a compelling investment,” Managing Director at Meritech Capital Partners Rob Ward said in a statement. “The BI market is experiencing a renaissance as data analysts and business users demand more than visualization and discovery from their tools. We expect Looker to lead the charge and become a dominant player.”

Looker CEO Frank Bien told ZDNet that they would use the round to grow the company.

“It’s really about growth at this phase. What this is all about is expansion. So we’re opening an office in London. We’ve opened an office in New York. We have the existing location in the Bay Area,” Bien said.  “It’s typical for a SaaS company. We’re entering that growth phase where you start to add more sales and marketing resources to drive into new markets and that’s where the majority of the money goes. Now clearly, engineering and the development on the product side scales with that.”

Including the new round Looker has raised $48 million to-date. As part of the deal Meritech Managing Director Rob Ward, himself an early investor via Meritich in enterprise companies including Tableau, Cloudera and Greenplum, is joining the Looker board.


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