Interana’s visual solution for events-based data rakes in another $20M

The race is on for analytics companies to make data easier and more useful.

One recent entry in that race, Interana, today announced that it has raised $20 million to propel its approach to visual data discovery tools.

The company, which formally launched in October, offers a “fast and easy-to-use event-based analytics solution to understand how customers behave and products are used,” CEO and cofounder Ann Johnson told VentureBeat via email.

The company’s solution offers both a visual front end and a database for direct interaction with all data sets, she added. By doing so, “both business and data teams [can] perform ad-hoc queries to explore data and discover trends and patterns in seconds across billions of events.”

Those English-language queries, according to Interana, could typically include such questions as: “Why did page views increase this week?” or “Which marketing channel is most effective?”

Event-based data shows trends so businesses can understand time-based factors affecting their growth, customer retention, or customer purchases. Data sources can include clickstreams from the Web, phone calling records, sales transactions, or sensor data.

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Johnson pointed to teamwork software provider Asana’s use of Interana to visualize “what user actions cause performance issues.”

“One of the key differentiators we see is Interana’s ability to scan [and sample] through large amounts of data at interactive speeds,” Asana head of infrastructure Prashant Pandey told us.

“This allows us to throw high-dimensional raw logs into Interana, without worrying about what kind of analysis we plan to do on the data,” he said. “Different teams use the same data source to perform different analyses and set up dashboards which are shared across the company. When new questions arise, we are able to analyze new or historical data using the same tool.”

Johnson told us that the new money will be used to “reach deeper into the enterprise with additional product development and continue to expand our go-to-market efforts.”

Index Ventures led the most recent round, with participation from new investors AME Cloud Ventures and Harris Barton, and from existing investors Battery Ventures, Data Collective, and Fuel Capital. Including the Series A round, the company has thus far raised a total of $28.2 million.

The previous experience of cofounder, CTO, and Ann’s husband Bobby Johnson includes serving as director of engineering at Facebook from 2006 to 2012, when the social network scaled from several million users to more than a billion. He personally authored the open source data tools Scribe and Haystack. The third cofounder, Lior Abraham, also worked at Facebook, where he wrote the internal analytics tool Scuba.

Ann Johnson told us, “The Big Data analytics space is overflowing with general-purpose solutions, but we aren’t [seeing many focused] specifically on event data.”

Event data, she added, is “the future of Big Data, because it holds the answers to key [time-based] business metrics that enable rapid growth, reduce churn, and build engagement with products and customers.”

She noted that MixPanel does something similar but at a smaller scale. But, she said, Interana’s approach “is revolutionary” because a purpose-built solution can provide greater performance and interactivity when dealing with event data.