Andreessen Horowitz Leads $15M Round In Cloud Business Intelligence Platform GoodData
Startup GoodData, which provides companies with a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) platform, has raised $15 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz with existing investors General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners and Windcrest Partners also contributing to the round. This investment brings GoodData’s total funding to $28.5 million. The company has also added two new members to the Board of Directors: John O’Farrell, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and Dave Girouard, President of Google Enterprise. Additionally, this marks Andreessen Horowitz’s fourth investment in GoodData (including two seed investments, and 2010 round).
Founded by serial entrepreneur Roman Stanek, GoodData offers a cloud-based data analytics solution that is more cost-effective than similar products offered by IBM, SAP and Oracle. Basically, companies can plug GoodData’s products into their own cloud-based SaaS products (i.e. Salesforce, Zendesk) and then can access operational dashboards, advanced reporting and data warehousing.
Beyond just structuring data, GoodData also gives companies the best practices and actionable insights based on data, adding a layer of intelligence. The company has a number of analytics apps for SaaS products, including Zendesk, Twilio, Pardot, and Get Satisfaction, which offers these companies’ customers additional insight into data. Currently the company offers 20 applications, and will be expanding to more SaaS platforms with the new funding. The company expects to add another 30 apps by the end of the year.
Stanek tells us that GoodData is disrupting the $25 billion BI and data warehousing space because previously data intelligence used to be a complicated process. But as more companies are relying on cloud applications for business functions such as sales, customer service and more, accessing and making sense of this enormous amount of cloud-based data has become a simplified process that takes minutes, he explains.
And GoodData’s offerings are seeing traction in the enterprise space. Over 2,500 companies, including Software AG, Time Warner Cable, Capgemini and Pandora Media, rely on GoodData’s data intelligence products. The company has seen 500% growth in overall platform usage in 2011 alone and is currently managing over 6,500 unique customer data mark. And more than 2 million reports were executed on the GoodData cloud BI platform in July of this year.
Adding Google’s enterprise chief, Girouard, to the board is a pretty significant vote of confidence for the startup. Girouard who will advise the company on product development, service delivery and sales of cloud services, says of the GoodData: “GoodData has an amazing opportunity to build a huge business. Cloud computing and analytics is a killer combination, and GoodData has taken a unique and promising approach to leading in this market.”
Andreessen Horowitz’s O’Farrell is also bullish on GoodData, tells us that that he sees the startup becoming a billion dollar company. He explains that because the mass market still has to move to the cloud, there is still so much more potential for cloud-based businesses like GoodData, which extract valuable information from cloud data. “That’s something businesses will spend a lot of money on,” says O’Farrell.
O’Farrell also made an interesting point about the business intelligence space, in general. He says there isn’t a low barrier of entry to the space, but GoodData goes beyond just providing graphs and simple data visualization tools to offering a powerful platform that actually gives companies actionable insight from all of their business data. This, he says, creates a high barrier to entry, and will help GoodData succeed.
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