Looker Looking Good with $16m Funding Win

US-based Business Intelligence (BI) start-up Looker has raised $16m in a series A round of venture funding, led by Redpoint Ventures, and will use the money to help meet customer demand, add to its global sales team and capitalize on recent growth.

Based in Santa Cruz, CA, Looker was founded by Lloyd Tabb, one of the Principal Engineers at Netscape and former CTO of LiveOps. It has recently added Marc Randolph, co-founder and first CEO of Netflix as a Board member and Frank Bien, formerly of Greenplum, as its CEO.

The latest funding, to which First Round Capital also contributed, brings the firm's total to date to $17.7m.

The Looker platform is powered by a comprehensive data modeling layer, LookML. Using Looker and LookML, organizations can leverage the work of their analysts and maximize their data management investments by distributing Looker across all functions of the business. The Looker BI Platform is rapidly installed, and users can be exploring data within hours - not weeks or months.

Looker's approach to BI is based on Web technologies rather than client-server, and uses a proprietary language called LookML, which it says 'radically simplifies' the scripting and recycling of SQL queries. It operated in stealth mode for more than a year before officially launching in March with more than 20 paying customers - a number it has since doubled.

Looker says its customers spend an average of 250 or more hours / month using its tools to explore their business data. CEO Bien (pictured) comments: 'We're Business Intelligence for the under-40 crowd, and the response to our product really shows that we've found a substantially underserved market that was ripe for innovation. No one has attacked the core of BI in the last ten years. We tore it down and rebuilt it from the ground up, wrote our own language, architected a web-based infrastructure, and delivered a product that's incredibly powerful.'

Web site: www.looker.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.