Unifi Software, the only self-service catalog and prep tool combined in a cloud-optimized Data as a Service platform, today announced it has secured $17.5 million in series B funding led by Scale Venture Partners. Existing investors Canaan Partners and Pelion Partners also invested in the round, which brings total funding to the organization to $32 million.

"The self-service model of the data & analytics ecosystem is the fastest-growing and will strategically impact every enterprise," said Andy Vitus, Partner, Scale Venture Partners. "We thoroughly researched the category and recognized there are first-generation tools that have failed to address the real needs of the business user. Unifi's approach to the problem of self-service data is dramatically different, and it's clear to us from the quick traction they have received in the market that enterprise customers recognize and value the differentiation."

Unifi has rapidly become the go-to tool of choice for business analysts at Global 2000 companies including AT Kearney, Boston Biomedical, Compassion First, Essentra, Havas, Microsoft, MoneyGram, Sabre, and West County Health Centers. The company is on track to boast over 200 customers by the end of the year. Governed by IT but operated by business users at all levels Unifi alleviates data bottlenecks and delivers faster business insights.

"Receiving the endorsement from an investment partner like Scale is a validation of the path we have taken with Unifi and of our vision for the future for Data as a Service," said Rob Carlson, CEO, Unifi Software."This investment will allow us to accelerate development, expand our sales team and market awareness to realize that vision sooner."

Growth Stats and Industry Recognition
In addition to strategic new hires in 2016, Unifi expanded by adding an office in Bangalore, India, bringing the company's total workforce to more than 40 employees. Among other signs of momentum in 2016, Unifi logged the following data points:

Data under management on Unifi: >20 petabytes
Data sets connected: 120 million
Active daily users: 547
Data jobs run to date: 18,867

In 2016, Unifi was called out by Gartner, IDC and Bloor Research International as the self-service data prep vendor to watch.

In its Market Guide for Self-Service Data Preparation, Gartner identified 10 specific features it deemed essential to delivering a truly end-to-end self-service data preparation platform. Gartner pinpointed Unifi as the only company with more than two-thirds of the features supported in all 10 categories.

IDC named Unifi an IDC Innovator in self-service data preparation, citing the company's prescriptive, unified approach to self-service data cataloging and preparation.

Bloor identified Unifi as a differentiated solution in a crowded field of old and new players, calling Unifi the only company "that has set out from the beginning to deliver both data inventory and data preparation capabilities, and which includes exactly the sorts of capabilities you would expect in both areas."

About Unifi Software
Unifi's Data as a Platform breaks down the barriers of operational data silos and democratizes information across the enterprise. At the heart of the platform is a comprehensive suite of self-service data discovery and preparation tools to empower business users. Employing machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies, and optimized for the cloud, Unifi predicts what the business user wants to visualize and then connects the resulting data natively to the BI tool for fast, accurate results.

Unifi was founded by data and enterprise infrastructure experts from Greenplum (now part of Dell Technologies), Oracle, Microsoft, and Platfora (now part of Workday). Headquartered in San Mateo, CA Unifi operates regional offices across the US and a development center in Bangalore, India.