Jaspersoft may be looking to acquire with its $11M funding

Business intelligence software maker, Jaspersoft, announced yesterday that it raised $11 million dollars in funding. The round was lead by existing investors Red Hat and SAP Ventures in addition to including newcomer Quest Software.

Jaspersoft caters to the enterprise with business intelligence products. It aims to centralize the way data is secured, delivered and analyzed.

“Data around us is exploding, the need to make sense of it is bigger than ever. You need to have an analytic product,” said Brian Gentile, chief executive of Jaspersoft.

You would think that means the funding will go toward creating a new product or enhancing its current one, right? Wrong. When asked what the plan was, Gentile replied, “We’d like to say we are doing nothing with it.” In essence, Jaspersoft is tabling the funds to be used as an “agile agent on the balance sheet”.

“The funding allows us to look beyond our roadmap and make tougher build versus buy decisions,” said Gentile. This means Jaspersoft is looking to acquire. Gentile elaborated there are four key areas Jaspersoft may buy into as opposed to create products in-house.  In priority order they are:

1)    Advanced Reporting: The ability to provide reports on a company’s operation and production data.

2)    Advanced Visualization: Supplying visual representations of data, such as a sophisticated graph form.

3)    Data Movement: Streamlining the transfer of data from its original source and formatting it to be consumed by Jaspersoft’s analytics engine.

4)    Advanced Analytics: More intelligent analysis of data using a variety of techniques such as memory and predictive analysis.

Jaspersoft has received $58 million in funding to date with Quest Software, Red Hat, SAP Ventures, Doll Capital Management, Morgenthaler Ventures, Partech International, Scale Venture Partners, and Adams Street Partners. The company is based in San Francisco and has 140 employees.