Metric Insights’ $2M funding reflects the feisty nature of the business analytics market

Look around for a company with tools for visualizing corporate data. You’ll find a whole bunch. Metric Insights knows about all the options out there, which is why the startup has focused on delivering to business people the most important discoveries from all the tools being used at a given company.

Investors seem to like Metric Insights’ current direction. They’ve gone ahead with a $2.1 million seed round that the startup is announcing today.

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Last year, the Metric Insights team realized that some of the capabilities in the startup’s analytics service overlapped with the features in existing business intelligence tools. The move acknowledges the feisty nature of that market — consider the recent entry of Salesforce.com, as well as the many venture-backed startups, like GoodData and Domo — and also points out the opportunities still existing in the market.

“By integrating our product with those vendors, we were able to address the pervasive problem that the industry was facing with business user adoption of BI tools,” Marius Moscovici, the startup’s founder and chief executive, explained in an email to VentureBeat. “This approach has been key to our rapid growth this year.”

Metric Insights has put much of its focus on performing a related but different function: alerting people who don’t generally have to pore over charts in various views from multiple tools.

Metric Insights gets the attention of people only when there is anomalous data that they have previously deemed relevant to them. Initial reports can come in emails. Then users can click on embedded charts and explore interactive versions with comment threads from colleagues that can provide context.

Moscovici originally got the startup going in 2010 after he had been frustrated by the lack of extensive and consistent usage of analytics tools at Second Life developer Linden Lab, where he was head of the company’s data warehousing and real-time-analytics group. Previously he had run a business-intelligence consulting company.

Thirty people now work for Metric Insights. The head count should double in the next year, Moscovici wrote.

First Round Capital led the round in San Francisco-based Metric Insights. Aster Data founder Tasso Argyos, Aerohive founder Changming Liu, and Linden Lab founder Phillip Rosedale also participated.

The new money will help the startup integrate with more tools, like Microstrategy, and plug in to more cloud-based business applications. And Moscovici wants to bring Metric Insights to wearable devices, too.

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