Looker builds data visualization and analytics tools that help customers explore and understand their data. The company said it has 1,600 customers and recently crossed a $100 million revenue run rate, with revenue growing 70% year over year. Looker currently employs around 600 people, having added about 200 this year, and expects further headcount growth in 2019. Management plans to use the new financing to build more product and hire sales teams to move deeper into enterprise markets. The CEO indicated this is likely the company’s last private fundraising as it prepares operationally for an eventual IPO and public‑company processes. Looker is a business intelligence platform that centralizes clean, reliable data to support analytics and enterprise machine learning. The company competes with legacy BI vendors such as IBM Cognos and Tableau and has focused on owning the BI vertical rather than fragmenting into visualization or data-prep niches. Looker doubled its customers from 400 to 800 over the last year and has nearly 400 employees after adding 100 in 2016. It maintains partnerships across cloud providers, including recognition from Google Cloud and an integration with Amazon Redshift. Leadership says the company aims to build a strong independent business and is positioning for scale with strategic partners and capital. Management views the latest round as “preemptive,” using the investment to accelerate growth and expand internationally (including leveraging Geodesic for China). Looker offers an analytics platform that connects in real time to SQL data stores and lets technical users model data with its LookML SQL dialect while giving end users direct access. The product is used by database managers, developers, data scientists and nontechnical end users to analyze data and build applications on top of it. The company reported roughly 400% revenue growth and grew its customer base from about 150 to over 450. Looker has around 200 employees and plans to double headcount in the coming year. Management says the company still has plenty of cash in the bank and has beaten plan 12 quarters in a row. The company plans to expand into Asia and the EU this year. Looker builds a business-intelligence platform centered on LookML, an easier-to-use language for database queries that enables in-database analytics and embedding in web applications. The product is offered as on-premise or hosted deployments and is sold via monthly recurring license fees on annual or multi-annual commitments. Management says it will use the new funding to invest in growing the company’s technology organically and has no acquisitions planned. The company reported revenues grew 400% year-over-year and serves roughly 250 customers, including Yahoo!, Warby Parker, Asana, Instacart, Docker, Venmo, Upworthy and Gilt. Looker currently has about 110 employees and projects headcount of 200 by year-end. The company cites strong engagement metrics from its forward-deploy model, claiming a 70% trial-to-win rate and 80–90% user adoption among customers. Looker offers a browser-based business intelligence product built around a proprietary language called LookML that simplifies and recycles SQL queries so non-engineers can query large data sets. The product can be deployed in hours and aims to replace legacy SQL-based BI systems by enabling natural-language-style querying. Looker launched after operating in stealth for a year and debuted earlier this year with more than 20 paying customers; since launch the company has grown to over 40 paying customers. The company raised the round to expand its sales team, hire additional engineers and invest in infrastructure to keep up with customer demand. Founder Lloyd Tabb, an early lead engineer from Netscape and LiveOps, leads the company as it competes with incumbents and fast-growing BI entrants.

Total raised

$281M

Funding rounds

6

Latest round

Series E

Latest activity

Dec 2018