Looker, a business intelligence startup founded by an early lead engineer from Netscape and LiveOps, has raised $16 Million in series A funding, led by Redpoint Ventures with First Round Capital, who invested in the company’s $2 million seed round, also participating. This brings the company’s funding total to $17.7 million.
Founded by Lloyd Tabb, Looker is aiming to disrupt the business intelligence space by turning what used to be programming queries into those based on natural language. Most legacy BI systems are based on SQL and require users to have engineering and programming expertise to formulate queries to pull out the data and make sense of these insights. Looker allows anyone to easily query these large data sets.
As the company explains, it’s like putting a data scientists within your browser. Part of the approach includes a proprietary language called LookML, which simplifies the process of scripting and recycling SQL queries. Using Looker and LookML, organizations can distribute Looker queries across all functions of the business, including sales, marketing and more. The Looker can be deployed in hours.
After operating in stealth for a year, Looker launched earlier this year with more than 20 paying customers. Since launch the company has more than doubled their customer base, with more than 40 paying customers now using Looker.
The company is raising the money primarily to expand its sales team and keep up with customer demand, as well as to hire more engineers and invest in infrastructure.
Helping businesses gather more insightful information and understanding around data isn’t a new trend. Good Data, Domo and a number of others are growing fast in the business intelligence world. Not only are we going to see more entrants into this space, but we’re likely to see more acquisitions by incumbents as well. All in all, it makes for a super interesting future for many of these companies.