Intel Capital Invests in GoodData

Intel Capital led the latest funding round for cloud analytics specialist GoodData, raking in an additional $25.7 million, the company said Oct. 2.

The Series E funding round continues the sustained uptick in venture capital investment in big data analytics companies.

Joining in GoodData’s largest funding round to date were Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Tenaya Capital, TOTVS, Next World Capital, Windcrest and Pharus Capital. GoodData also said Intel Capital Director Igor Taber would join its board of directors.

“We are just starting to tap the potential of analytics for big data,” Jason Waxman, vice president of Intel’s Data Center Group and General Manager of its Cloud Platforms Group, said in a statement. “We are investing not only in GoodData’s differentiated, cloud-based analytics solution, but also in the future impact that big data insights can provide across industries.”

Founded in 2007 by CEO Roman Stanek, San Francisco-based GoodData caught the early software-as-a-service wave by pulling data from clients’ Salesforce.com and Marketo implementations, combining it with data from other sources, then delivering it via Web-based dashboards.

It essentially developed a big data analytics stack engineered to run in the cloud, with little or no assistance from customer IT organizations. The approach was intended as a way to help customers avoid big capital investments in hardware and software.

“Organizations increasingly analyze data at scale in the cloud,” Stanek noted in announcing the funding round. “We have always recognized a need in the market for a complete, cloud-based big data platform.”

The company claims its user base has more than doubled in the past year following the release of its Open Analytics Platform.

In March, GoodData announced the addition of Hadoop to its cloud-based big data analytics stack with the aim of boosting the capacity to crunch and store new levels of data.

The company also has developed what it calls a “multi-dimensional analytics query language,” or MARQL, to access data stored in its proprietary data engine. The engine combines traditional SQL and ROLAP (relational online analytics processing) technologies and in-memory processing.

GoodData also developed its own data connectors, ETL, data cleansing, integration and visualization layers. It then added support for R and predictive and prescriptive analytics.

As part of the Open Analytics Platform, GoodData adopted Hadoop as a means for ingesting large amounts of data and as a long-term data archive. “It’s the staging area and archive at the same time,” GoodData marketing chief Jeff Morris told Datanami in March. “We load it all in, snapshot it, index it and add our own metadata tagging to it so we know where it came from, whose it was, what it contains.”

The latest funding round brings GoodData’s total venture funding to more than $100 million.

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