Looker Announces VC Haul to Fund Platform Push

Looker announced a $100 million-plus funding round this week as it looks to transition from a business intelligence and data visualization provider to a full-fledged data platform vendor.

Looker said Thursday (Dec. 6) its latest funding campaign generated a hefty $103 million in a round led by Premji Invest and new funder Cross Creek Advisors. The data startup based in Santa Cruz, Calif., has so far raised $280.5 million since 2013, and said it would use the latest investment to promote its data platform while expanding its market reach to Asia and Europe.

The emerging platform vendor uses its data modeling language, LookML, as the foundation of its data platform along with BI and visualization tools. The company said its platform consolidates fragmented data preparation and visualization tools along with cataloging and governance into a single unified service.

The platform also leverages a software-as-a-service approach to tap into fast cloud databases.

“We believe that data becomes exponentially more valuable when it is intelligently integrated together, at scale, across the entire organization,” said Looker CEO Frank Bien. That approach differentiates Looker’s platform from “single-use data tools.”

Added Bein: “We built a new platform for data that greatly simplifies the data supply chain, so organizations can extract value from their data more quickly.”

As part of its expansion, Looker said it has added more than 200 new employees at seven locations this year. The expansion includes a new Tokyo office as it expands operations in the Asia-Pacific region. It also has overseas offices in London and Dublin, Ireland.

Along with Premji Invest and Cross Creek Advisors, other Looker investors include Goldman Sachs, Kleiner Perkins and Redpoint Ventures.

The data platform builder expanded the reach of its “horizontal” foundation earlier this year when it integrated its tools with the beta release of Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) cloud-based BigQuery ML.

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