Looker, a business intelligence startup co-founded by early lead engineer from Netscape and LiveOps Lloyd Tabb, has raised another $30 million in Series B funding, money that co-founder and CEO Frank Bien says will be used to invest in growing the company’s technology organically — not by acquisition.
“We’re a tech company and will continue to lead with technology,” he said. “We’re improving the product across the board, including building on our ability to embed Looker in other web applications, generally improve our business-user experience, and increase the power of working ‘in database’ across the data infrastructure landscape. We do not have any acquisitions planned at this time.”
It is hiring, however: the company currently has 110 employees and projects 200 by the end of this year.
The news comes after a year in which the company’s revenues grew 400%. 250 customers now use Looker to parse their data troves to make business decisions, including biggies like Yahoo!, Warby Parker, Asana, Instacart, Docker, Venmo, Upworthy and Gilt.
The round was led by new investor Meritech Capital Partners, which has backed of other notable SaaS businesses like Tableau (which Looker competes with), Cloudera and Greenplum. Sapphire Ventures — formerly known as the strategic investment arm of SAP — and existing investors Redpoint Ventures, First Round Capital, PivotNorth also participated. This brings the total raised by Looker to nearly $48 million (following a $2 million seed round and a $16 million Series A). As part of this round Meritech MD Rob Ward is joining the board.
