Platfora Raises $30 Million, With Total Now at $95 Million

In San Mateo, CA, Platfora, Inc. announced $30 million in growth-stage financing from new investors HSBC and Harmony Partners, with participation from earlier-stage backers including Allegis Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Citi Ventures, Cisco Systems, Inc., Sutter Hill Ventures and Tenaya Capital.

This new round brings Platfora’s total amount raised to $95 million.

Additionally, the company has signed dozens of new customers including consumer brands Sears, TiVo and Kelley Blue Book.

“Organizations of all types are facing big challenges to harness the power of big data analytics and need to empower business users with the right tools to address them,” said Remi Bourrette, head of strategic innovation investments, HSBC. “We identified Platfora as a partner in this field, given it’s an important player in an evolution that could affect many industries the way business intelligence did in the early 2000s.”

Why Data-driven Companies are Choosing Platfora
Platfora is succeeding where the last generation of technology falls short. By combining traditionally separate tools – analytics, business intelligence, data visualization, data preparation and in-memory acceleration – Platfora’s big data discovery platform reduces project completion from 12-18 months to a matter of hours.

“Platfora provides answers faster than conventional data warehouses and BI environments ever could, and at about 1/10th the cost,” said Tom Chang, software engineering manager, Cisco WebEx.

Platfora’s customers may span a diverse set of industries, but they have one thing in common: they are defining what it means to be data-driven for the rest of the world. In the past year, companies such as AutoTrader, Citi, Coupons.com, Disney, Edmunds.com, Kelley Blue Book, Karma (Fisker), Opower, Riot Games, Sears, TiVo and Vivint have leveraged Platfora for customer marketing, behavioral analysis, security, IoT and other common big data use cases.

As an example, Platfora big data Discovery has helped Kelley Blue Book realize millions of dollars in marketing and advertising savings and boosted its competitive edge.

“We’ve seen a 37% increase in spend efficiency by optimizing the allocation of our marketing budget,” mentioned Chris Evans, senior manager of consumer marketing, Kelley Blue Book Co., Inc. “The keyword analysis and optimization efforts have helped us realize millions in search savings.”

“Self-service platforms such as Platfora unleash the expertise of data scientists,” said Chris Kudelka, data engineer, Riot Games, Inc. “Insights from League of Legends’ 67 million monthly active users led to actions taken that improved the overall player experience.”

Since the company announced its prior financing round of $38 million in March 2014, Platfora has been firing on all cylinders.

Highlights include:

Growing revenue more than 100% year over year.
Expanding customer base by greater than 100%. Platfora further penetrated the U.S. and secured its first deals in Europe and Asia, which included several new industries and verticals.
Delivering two major releases of Platfora big data Discovery. In September, the company announced version 5.0, which is the single most powerful, flexible and complete Hadoop- and Spark-native analytics platform. It includes a more tightly integrated workflow with new features from Platfora and critical big data discovery technologies including Apache Spark, SQL and Excel.
Earning several industry accolades from technology publications, including CIO Magazine‘s 10 Hot Hadoop start-ups to Watch, Fortune‘s Ones to Watch in Big Data, Business Insider‘s “12 Hot Data start-ups to Watch, CRN Magazine‘s Big Data 100: Business Analytics.
In August, Platfora bolstered its management team with the appointment of Jason Zintak as CEO, who brings operational experience from growth-stage companies including Responsys (Oracle), JDA, SAP, Capgemini and Blue Martini. Founder and former CEO Ben Werther continues on as executive chairman.

“I’m very pleased with what Platfora has been able to achieve in a relatively short amount of time. We’re now the leader in this new class of technology,” said Jason Zintak, CEO, Platfora. “No doubt, 2016 will be our best year yet as the value of Platfora is now proven across many industries and the ROI is obvious.“

“At Opower, we view data as a product and invest in the entire lifecycle, from ingest and storage to analysis and presentment. Platfora is a key part of our solution,” said Meghann Lomas, senior product manager for business intelligence and data science, Opower, Inc.

“Apache Spark provides access to advanced analytical capabilities like machine learning, predictive analytics, and graph processing that our team is excited to leverage as a part of Platfora’s end-to-end offering,” said Andrew Robbins, CEO, Paytronix Systems, Inc.