Looker claims to be the only one handling information from the database in which its housed all the way to end uses like a prompt to pull up a report within chat tool Slack.
To keep up its quick ascent in the business intelligence ranks, Looker’s raised capital to fuel expansion. The latest: a $81.5 million Series D funding round announced on Thursday. It was by led by Google parent Alphabet’s growth equity fund CapitalG. The fundraise brings Looker’s total funding to $177.5 million to date. It values the company around $850 million, according to sources with knowledge of the deal.
That technical differentiation comes from a bet the company made at its start in 2012. Companies had moved away from the database language SQL in favor of the open-source framework Hadoop. Looker’s founders bet that the market would swing back the other way if SQL could be supported and a company’s data structured at scale. Instead of extracting the data, Looker would live alongside it in the database.
Source: Forbes (30/03/2017)
