Alteryx has raised $12 million for its business intelligence service designed for data analysts to build tools out of their own internal data and that from third parties.
The investment comes from SAP Ventures and Toba Capital, a new firm founded by former Quest Founder and CEO Vinny Smith. Quest sold to Dell last year for $2.4 billion. Total funding for Alteryx is now $18 million. SAP also participated in the first round.
The Alteryx platform streams data into a data engine. The analyst then packages apps and publishes to the cloud. The analyst works with data behind the firewall, pulling in third-party information such as social streams. MongoDB, the NoSQL database, is used to serve up data to the app gallery.
The apps are pretty easy to use once set up for the user. I tried the service when I looked at the company late last year.
Alteryx plays in a very hot market. President Chief Operating Officer George Mathew said the business intelligence sector is estimated to be $10 to $12 billion by IDC. It’s evident in the news of the past week with Tableau having a very successful IPO.
Alteryx sees the market as defined by the total number of data analysts, which is estimated at 3 to 4 million. In contrast, there are only 200,000 data scientists.
Alteryx compares itself to products such as SAS and Tibco Spotfire, which Mathew says takes more time to integrate than its platform.
There is a reason why the business intelligence market is growing at such a clip. It’s the volume and velocity of data that requires tools that can get to the data fast and be accessible so the analyst can package it and provide to the end-user.