Tenaya Capital, the venture capital firm spun out of Lehman Brothers following its bankruptcy, has led a $38m series C investment in Platfora, a data analytics software company.
The latest round includes Citi Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of financial services company Citi, which is also a Platfora customer, as well as corporate investor Cisco and Allegis Capital. Existing backers Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and In-Q-Tel also invested, brining the company’s total funding to $65m.
Platfora will use the funds to invest aggressively in talent, technology and field organisations in order to enable it to lead organisations in a once-in-a-generation shift away from SQL-based business intelligence technology into the current era of Big Data Analytics.
The attraction for investors is the fact that the company can enable non-technical users to interactively manipulate data to make fact-based decisions without the intervention of IT.
“For business analysts, the promise of Big Data Analytics can be very seductive. However, they are often hampered by a plethora of immature, emerging technologies that often require significant IT or programming skills,” said Dr. Barry Devlin, founder of 9sight Consulting.
Brian Paul, managing director of Tenaya Capital, said the widespread adoption of big data infrastructure by mainstream enterprises presents a tremendous opportunity for analytics vendors.
“We believe Platfora’s unique intellectual property and its ability to help any company unlock new business opportunities from their data assets will resonate in the market,” said Paul.
“Big Data and the Internet of Everything are driving major IT disruptions today. But for organizations to take advantage of these shifts, they need scalable analytics platforms,” added Hilton Romanski, senior vice president of corporate business development at Cisco.
“Platfora’s analytics layer not only makes legacy and Hadoop infrastructure instantly more valuable, but helps non-technical business professionals access the data they need to innovate,” said Ramneek Gupta, managing director of Citi Ventures.
“We have been engaged with Platfora for over 18 months and are excited to participate in this round of funding. We are particularly impressed by their interactive, real-time analytics capabilities on data at scale in Hadoop. The Holy Grail for Big Data Analytics is to provide information workers with direct data access and analytical capabilities at their desktops, through an integrated environment powerful enough to understand, manipulate, and analyse any data source no matter its age or structure. When line-of-business workers are given this capability and trained to use it wisely, companies experience a quickening effect offering potential competitive advantages once unattainable or even unimaginable.”