Business intelligence platform Looker is announcing a wholesome $81.5 million Series D today led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s cleverly named growth investment arm. Goldman Sachs and Geodesic Capital helped fill out the round, joining existing investors KPCB, Meritech Capital Partners, Redpoint and Sapphire Ventures.
Rather than compete in segmented markets against visualization and data preparation startups, Looker wants to own the vertical of business intelligence. The company supports the adoption of enterprise machine learning by providing a source of clean and reliable data.
Pushing up hard against IBM Cognos and Tableau, Looker has been able to grow its market share in the competitive enterprise business intelligence space. Frank Bien, CEO of Looker, told TechCrunch that the company has doubled its customers from 400 to 800 in the last year.
Though startups don’t afford us the transparency of raw revenue and growth numbers, Bien characterizes today’s round as “preemptive.” Google (Alphabet) can support the growth of Looker’s data infrastructure while Goldman Sachs offers advisory perks.
“Google has a reach to help and bring expertise that’s beneficial to…