Trifacta, a Data Transformation Platform provider, today announced that it has closed a $12 million Series B financing round led by Greylock Partners and Accel Partners. The latest round of funding further validates the need for a solution that helps business analysts, data scientists and IT programmers transform today's overwhelming variety of data into actionable form.

This represents the company's second round of funding, bringing the total capital raised to $16.3 million.

'The way that Trifacta gives non technical people the ability to transform big data is nearly magical in its simplicity and power,' said Joseph Ansanelli, Greylock Partner. 'I'm thrilled to support them in my first investment with Greylock Partners.'

Developed by computer science professors Joe Hellerstein of the University of California Berkeley and Jeffrey Heer of the University of Washington along with Stanford University Ph.D. Sean Kandel, Trifacta has created a platform that provides an innovative user experience coupling human and machine intelligence to close the gap between people and data. The platform enables users to quickly and intuitively transform raw data into actionable form whether for immediate insights or for use in analysis tools.

'Having clean, standardized data goes a long way toward helping people make sense of it,' said Chris Stolte, chief development officer and co-founder of Tableau Software. 'Trifacta is bringing to the market a breakthrough approach, which will make it far easier for people to transform raw data into useful form and spend more time answering important questions.'

By the end of 2015, Gartner estimates 85 percent of Fortune 500s will be unable to exploit big data's advantages. The critical obstacle is not in fact the technology, but the humans who are key to deriving meaning from data. Data scientists spend as much as 60 to 80 percent of their time transforming data -- evaluating, structuring, and cleansing -- rather than focusing on deriving true data analytics and business insights.

'Enterprises around the world are deploying an Enterprise Data Hub to securely store and access data. Unlocking the value of multi-structured data demands intelligent application-level interfaces engineered for simplicity and scalability. Users must have good tools to ingest and explore that data,' said Mike Olson, chief strategy officer and co-founder of Cloudera. 'Trifacta's new interaction technology allows analysts to transform data at scale, efficiently, making the EDH an even better home for data that matters to the business.'

Trifacta's approach to Data Transformation enables users and algorithms to work together in the transformation process. In the Trifacta platform, users visualize data and the effects of algorithmic suggestions, while machine learning methods analyze data and user interactions. By providing an interface that harnesses both human and machine intelligence, Trifacta makes data transformation accessible to business data analysts, while radically increasing the productivity of quantitative data scientists.

'Data transformation is everybody's problem, but nobody's job. After spending years interviewing data and business analysts about challenges they face working with data, we recognized that solving this problem would require a radically different approach,' said Joe Hellerstein, CEO and co-founder of Trifacta. 'Much like the graphical user interface changed the way that people work with computers, Trifacta is changing the way that people work with data.'

'There are a large number of companies that I talk to who are actively looking for a solution like Trifacta,' said Ping Li partner at Accel Partners. 'Trifacta was one of the early investments to come out of our first Big Data Fund. They started with an amazing team of technologists and interaction experience designers and have continued to build an impressive team to solve this complex problem.'

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About Trifacta
Trifacta, the pioneer in data transformation, significantly enhances the value of an enterprise's Big Data by enabling users to easily transform raw, complex data into clean and structured formats for analysis. Leveraging decades of innovative work in human-computer interaction, scalable data management and machine learning, Trifacta's unique technology creates a partnership between user and machine, with each side learning from the other and becoming smarter with experience.