GoodData gets $25.7M to grow, grow, grow in business intelligence

GoodData, a startup that sells cloud-based business-intelligence software, said today that it has closed a $25.7 million round of funding, placing it in a better position to compete with the largest enterprise software companies, not to mention a bunch of startups.

“This place is getting serious, so we need to have some real cash to actually be a player,” Roman Stanek, the startup’s founder and chief executive, told VentureBeat in an interview.

Indeed, last month Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff hinted that a cloud-based business-intelligence service might be on the way. Oracle, SAP, and Tableau already sell comparable tools, not to mention startups like Birst, Domo, and SiSense.

“One of the reasons Salesforce and Oracle and so on are going to the cloud is because everybody knows that’s where the next battleground will be,” said Stanek, Increasingly, he said, large companies and not just brave startups are trusting external clouds to analyze their treasured data.

GoodData’s application can bring together data from several sources, including companies’ on-premises databases and cloud services like Salesforce.com, and then analyze and visualize it. The startup can also perform predictive analytics, analyze the emotion in text, and provide a dedicated columnar database.

The startup claims to have more than 40,000 customers, including Bonobos, Hootsuite, HP, Virgin America, and Zendesk.

More than 300 people work for GoodData, and that number could approach 400 within a year, Stanek said. The company started in 2007 and is based in San Francisco.

Intel Capital led the new round. Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Next World Capital, Pharus Capital, Tenaya Capital, TOTVS, and Windcrest also participated.

Intel’s participation in the funding does mean something. The chip maker is helping the startup meet customers’ privacy needs and comply with regulations. The companies are also collaborating to develop more efficient data-storage techniques, Stanek said.

To date, GoodData has raised $101.2 million, including a $22 million round from last year.