Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Big-Data Start-Up GoodData Lands $25 Million Series C Led by Tenaya Capital

There are an awful lot of start-ups that claim to want to help companies find useful meaning in the deluge of data they are producing, and there’s an awful lot of money going to those start-ups.

One that has gotten a fair amount of attention — in no small part thanks to those who invested in it — is GoodData, founded by CEO Roman Stanek (pictured). A little less than a year ago, it took $15 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz. That round was also notable because AH had been an early seed-stage investor in the company.

Today, GoodData announced it has kicked its funding up a notch, landing a $25 million Series C led by Tenaya Capital, with participation from a new investor, Next World Capital. Prior investors, including AH, General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners and Windcrest Partners all participated in the round, which brings GoodData’s total capital raised to $53.5 million. Brian Paul, a managing director at Tenaya, will join GoodData’s board.

GoodData’s approach to the big-data problem is to do — what else? — harness the cloud. But it does it in a slightly different manner. Rather than compete directly with the usual providers of business intelligence software, like SAP, Oracle and IBM, it offers its service indirectly via cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services, Dell’s Boomi cloud-integration service, and Okta, the start-up focused on providing unified access to SaaS services.

It’s working. The company’s customer base has surged to 6,000, and bookings — a key indicator of future revenue that has turned into an important metric for companies in the cloud software space, like Salesforce.com — grew by 600 percent in 2011.

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald