Looker Follows up Major Platform Release with $100M Growth Funding
Looker announced today that it has raised $103 million in new venture backing. The funding, which is the company’s sixth round in 7 years, brings the company’s total to $280 million raised. Looker’s revenue grew 70 percent year-over-year in 2018, and the California-based data analytics provider added 500 customers during that span. The announcement comes on the heels of Looker’s major platform release in October when it unveiled version 6 of its flagship software.
Looker offers a BI and data analytics platform that is built on LookML, the company’s proprietary modeling language. It connects to any relational database like Amazon Redshift or Google BigQuery, and automatically generates data models for specific schemas. Users can refine the models to reflect company-specific metrics and business logic to build KPI dashboards and departmental reports. The provider also offers an embedded analytics platform called Powered by Looker.
Looker 6 features a new suite of development tools for data analysts that include foldering, importing work from other people, and an expanded set of permissioning options around model development. The product’s application for web analytics touts filtering and drilling capabilities as well, enabling users to dig into row-level details at will. There’s also a dedicated application for digital marketers that provides cross-channel insights to help users optimize performance across marketing channels.
In a statement, the company’s CEO Frank Bien said of the new funding: “We built a new platform for data that greatly simplifies the data supply chain, so organizations can extract value from their data more quickly. We are pleased to have Premji and Cross Creek invest in Looker and in our vision to bring a new class of data platform to companies around the world.”
Looker was the top-ranked provider in Gartner’s May Analytics and Business Intelligence Voice of the Customer and a top analytics product in the Forbes Cloud 100. Solutions Review named the company an Analytics and Business Intelligence Vendor to Watch in 2019 earlier this week.