Looker Data Sciences, Inc. today announced a Series A round of investment capital. The company raised $16 Million in venture funding in a round led by Redpoint Ventures, with contributions from First Round Capital and previous seed-round investors. In addition, Looker welcomed Tomasz Tunguz, a principal with Redpoint Ventures, to the company's board of directors.

Looker, which launched their Looker BI Platform? in March 2013, has grown rapidly in the past five months. The company has since doubled its customer base to more than forty data-driven customers, and has seen its prospect opportunity pipeline grow well over 300%. Looker enables businesses to engage with data interactively and allows high-resolution drill-down on their data, leading to extremely high levels of engagement. On average, a Looker customer spends more than two hundred and fifty hours a month using Looker to engage with data--and typically with terabyte-scale datasets.

'We're Business Intelligence for the under-40 crowd, and the response to our product really shows that we've found a substantially underserved market that was ripe for innovation,' said Frank Bien, CEO of Looker. 'No one has attacked the core of BI in the last ten years. We tore it down and rebuilt it from the ground up, wrote our own language, architected a web-based infrastructure, and delivered a product that's incredibly powerful. The Looker platform provides a modern leverage point for data analysts to service their business user populations effectively and efficiently.'

Looker brings BI into the modern era with an agile, browser-based analytics platform for exploring and collaborating with data of any size. As straightforward to use as the web itself, Looker enables a new data experience that introduces anyone within an organization to a curiosity-driven approach through powerful analytic applications. The Looker platform is powered by a comprehensive data modeling layer, LookML. Using Looker and LookML, organizations can leverage the work of their analysts and maximize their data management investments by distributing Looker across all functions of the business.

'The next wave of innovation in big data is the democratization of data exploration, enabling every employee in an enterprise to ask and answer their own questions easily, without having to ask for the help of the data team,' said Tomasz Tunguz, Principal at Redpoint Ventures. 'Looker's product is exceptionally well-suited to catalyze that wave.'

Since launch, the company has hired key executives and laid the groundwork for continued expansion. The company will use the funds to build out its sales team, hire additional engineering talent, and invest in operational infrastructure. Expansion has begun with a new VP of Sales, Lambert Billet, who joins Looker from Endeca (acquired by Oracle in 2011), with previous sales leadership positions at HP, Vignette, Sun, and others. Billet will expand the sales team and national presence to deliver Looker's BI platform to the many organizations seeking to capitalize on the next generation of data discovery.

About Looker

Looker is a Business Intelligence software company that focuses on helping customers use data to achieve success. Looker is enabling true discovery-driven businesses, one customer at a time, by unlocking the value of their data. Looker was purpose-built to interact with the next generation of analytic databases, like Pivotal/Greenplum, HP/Vertica, Amazon/Redshift, and others. The company was founded by Lloyd Tabb, Principal Engineer at Netscape and former CTO of LiveOps. Investors in Looker include Redpoint Ventures, First Round Capital, and PivotNorth. The company is based in Santa Cruz, CA.