Numerify lands $8 million to handle data across multiple clouds

The founders of business-analytics startup Numerify don’t want to go into detail about how they plan to simplify the merging of data from many disparate on-and-off-premise sources. But their strategy has won the support of big-name investors, suggesting the timing could be right for a successful play in a busy market.

Today the Cupertino, Calif. company announced it has closed an $8 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Additional contributions came from Frank Slootman, chief executive of ServiceNow; Amit Singh, president of Google Enterprise; Deep Nishar, senior vice president of products and user experience at LinkedIn; James Ramsey, former executive vice president of sales at NetSuite; and Abhay Parasnis, a former senior vice president of product development at Oracle.

The funding will go toward building the product based on early user input.

It helps that the company’s two founders are Oracle veterans packing deep business-intelligence experience. Gaurav Rewari, its chief executive, was vice president of product strategy and management at the database hardware and software giant; Srikant Gokulnatha, the startup’s vice president of development, headed up development for Oracle’s scores of business-intelligence applications. Both also did product management at longstanding business analytics vendor MicroStrategy.

During their time at Oracle, Rewari said, he and his cofounder saw companies adopting more and more cloud applications for operations — think Salesforce.com — while leaving analytics tools in their current state, often in trusted on-premise environments. While some businesses might want to be more agile and deploy cloud analytics software, Rewari said, “it’s our belief that to really unlock the potential of cloud analytics, some key technical challenges need to be overcome.”

Integrating data across many sources, both in and out of the cloud, is one such challenge. With cloud tools, Rewari said, “you don’t necessarily have access to the underlying database. What you have access to are the APIs (application programming interfaces).” And each of those APIs has its own set of characteristics.

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Companies often look to system integrators to build custom solutions. Numerify is different; it wants to deliver that heavy lifting as a service, in a way that can be easily repeated, and thereby make cloud analytics as easy as the cloud operation applications themselves, Rewari said.

Sounds nice in theory. Interested parties will have to wait until the first half of next year to get a better grip on how Numerify will work — and how much it will stand out from other data-integration companies, from MuleSoft to Tibco.