Platfora Raises $38 Million to Grow Big Data Analytics

Venture capital continues to pour into big data companies, with big data analytics software company Platfora announcing a $38 million investment round.  Led by Tenaya Capital, other participants in the round include Citi Ventures, Cisco and Allegis Capital, as well as prior investors Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and In-Q-Tel.

The company will use the funds to invest aggressively in talent, technology and field organizations to enable Platfora to lead organizations in a shift away from SQL-based databases to "noSQL" technologies.

“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 Brian Paul, Managing Director at Tenaya Capital.

Silicon Valley startup Platfora has now raised $65 million total, and lists customers like Disney, Comcast and Edmunds.com.

“Enterprises are awash in data but are struggling to gain useful insights. While intuition is critical in business, business executives readily admit that they are still making too many gut decisions because they cannot adequately access or analyze all of their data to make better informed decisions," said Ben Werther, CEO at Platfora. "They cannot access or interpret these new large and heterogeneous big data sets fast enough. With our big data analytics platform, we’re helping organizations participate and win in the Fact-based Economy which we estimate will unlock $5 trillion in new value in the next 10 years through novel uses of big data.”

“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. “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 analyze 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.”