Data segmentation and analytics firm Segment.io Inc. has joined forces with rising business intelligence star Looker Data Sciences Inc. on a technology integration that enables Looker users to pipe the results of their analysis into Segment’s data pipeline for purposes such as targeted marketing.

The deal unites two of the hottest companies in the data analytics business. Looker completed an $81.5 million funding round in March and Segment closed a $64 million round earlier this month, bringing its total funding to more than $108 million.

Looker Source for Segment combines Looker’s data modeling features with Segment’s integration and metatagging features to refine data prior to loading into marketing automation tools like those from Marketo Inc.

“The tools you use to create an email campaign, or message customers often have a fairly simple user interface for creating segments of the audience,” said Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and chief executive of Segment. “For example, you can send a message to people who have purchased in the last seven days, but not to people who have looked at products in the last seven days but not made a purchase.”

Looker’s data integration and visualization features should make that process simpler. The company claims to eliminate data extraction processes by automating SQL database queries to pull in data directly from multiple sources for visual comparisons. For example, marketers can combine sales data from Salesforce.com Inc. and customer service data from the Zendesk Inc. platform to identify active sales prospects who have nevertheless rated their experiences with the company poorly.

This list of at-risk customers can then be loaded into Segment and combined with other data, such as email response history, to create sub-segments that can be piped into Marketo for customized messaging. Marketo can be used to set up a campaign for that segment and measure results.

Segment also has partnerships with a long list of BI companies, but Looker “is the only partner that has the ability to create an audience and send that audience through Segment to downstream tools like email marketing tools,” Reinhardt said. “Segment is a system for moving data around, but we have no built-in interface for querying or analyzing. That’s Looker’s strong suit.”

The Looker integration will appear as an import option for Segment customers and an export option for Looker customers, but there are no plans for sales bundling or package discounts.

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