Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Google made a big splash this morning when it announced it’s going to acquire Looker, a hot analytics startup that’s raised more than $280 million. It’s paying $2.6 billion for the privilege and adding the company to Google Cloud.

Thomas Kurian, the man who was handed the reins to Google Cloud at the end of last year, sees the two companies bringing together a complete data analytics solution for customers. “The combination provides an end-to-end analytics platform to connect, collect, analyze and visualize data across Google Cloud, Azure, AWS, on-premises databases and ISV applications,” Kurian explained at a media event this morning.

Google Cloud has been mired in third place in the cloud infrastructure market, and grabbing Looker gives it an analytics company with a solid track record. The last time I spoke to Looker, it was announcing a hefty $103 million in funding on a $1.6 billion valuation. Today’s price is a nice even billion over that.

As I wrote at the time, Looker’s CEO Frank Bien wasn’t all that interested in bragging about valuations; he wanted to talk about what he considered more important numbers:

He reported that the company has 1,600 customers now and just crossed the $100 million revenue run rate, a significant milestone for any enterprise SaaS company. What’s more, Bien reports revenue is still growing 70 percent year over year, so there’s plenty of room to keep this going.

Today, in a media briefing on the deal, he said that from the start, his company was really trying to disrupt the business intelligence and analytics market. “What we wanted to do was disrupt this pretty staid ecosystem of data visualization tools and data prep tools that companies were being forced to build solutions. We thought it was time to rationalize a new platform for data, a single place where we could really reconstitute a single view of information and make it available in the enterprise for business purposes,” he said.

Diagram: Google & Looker

Slide: Google & Looker

Bien saw today’s deal as a chance to gain the scale of the Google cloud platform, and as successful as the company has been, it’s never going to have the reach of Google Cloud. “What we’re really leveraging here, and I think the synergy with Google Cloud, is that this data infrastructure revolution and what really emerged out of the Big Data trend was very fast, scalable — and now in the cloud — easy to deploy data infrastructure,” he said.

Kurian also emphasized that the company will intend to support multiple databases and multiple deployment strategies, whether multi-cloud, hybrid or on premises.

Perhaps, it’s not a coincidence that Google went after Looker as the two companies had a strong existing partnership and 350 common customers, according to Google. “We have many common customers we’ve worked with. One of the great things about this acquisition is that the two companies have known each other for a long time, we share very common culture,” Kurian said.

This is a huge deal for Google Cloud, easily topping the $625 million it paid for Apigee in 2016. It marks the first major deal in the Kurian era as Google tries to beef up its market share. While the two companies share common customers, the addition of Looker should bring a net gain that could help them upsell to other parts of the Looker customer base.

Per usual, this deal is going to be subject to regulatory approval, but it is expected to close later this year if all goes well.

Looker has been helping customers visualize and understand their data for seven years, and today it got a big reward, a $103 million Series E investment on a $1.6 billion valuation.

The round was led by Premji Invest, with new investment from Cross Creek Advisors and participation from the company’s existing investors. With today’s investment, Looker has raised $280.5 million, according the company.

In spite of the large valuation, Looker CEO Frank Bien really wasn’t in the mood to focus on that particular number, which he said was arbitrary, based on the economic conditions at the time of the funding round. He said having an executive team old enough to remember the dot-com bubble from the late 1990s and the crash of 2008 keeps them grounded when it comes to those kinds of figures.

Instead, he preferred to concentrate on other numbers. He reported that the company has 1,600 customers now and just crossed the $100 million revenue run rate, a significant milestone for any enterprise SaaS company. What’s more, Bien reports revenue is still growing 70 percent year over year, so there’s plenty of room to keep this going.

He said he took such a large round because there was interest and he believed that it was prudent to take the investment as they move deeper into enterprise markets. “To grow effectively into enterprise customers, you have to build more product, and you have to hire sales teams that take longer to activate. So you look to grow into that, and that’s what we’re going to use this financing for,” Bien told TechCrunch.

He said it’s highly likely that this is the last private fundraising the company will undertake as it heads toward an IPO at some point in the future. “We would absolutely view this as our last round unless something drastic changed,” Bien said.

For now, he’s looking to build a mature company that is ready for the public markets whenever the time is right. That involves building internal processes of a public company even if they’re not there yet. “You create that maturity either way, and I think that’s what we’re doing. So when those markets look okay, you could look at that as another funding source,” he explained.

The company currently has around 600 employees. Bien indicated that they added 200 this year alone and expect to add additional headcount in 2019 as the business continues to grow and they can take advantage of this substantial cash infusion.

 Looker is holding its Join user conference this week, and these affairs often involve a new release to show off to customers. Today, the company released Looker 5, which they say will make it easier for employees to make use of data in their work lives. Company CEO Frank Bien believes there is a growing group of people, who need quick access to data to do their jobs. “At a high level,… Read More

 Business intelligence platform Looker is announcing an $81.5 million Series D today led by CapitalG. Rather than compete in segmented markets against visualization and data preparation startups, Looker wants to own the vertical of business intelligence. The company supports the adoption of enterprise machine learning by providing a source of clean and reliable data. Read More

 The application is where we traditionally tend to work with a piece of software, but with the increasing use of APIs, sometimes the application is just one way of interacting with the tool. Looker announced version 4 of its data visualization tool today with expanded ways to make use of the data beyond the interface itself.
Sure, they updated the interface as part of today’s broad… Read More

 Looker, a data visualization and business intelligence startup announced a new component today that brings Looker data directly into Slack conversations without having to access the program separately. The new tool is called Looker Slack Bot and is built using the Slack bot technology. It provides a way for users working in Slack to access data related to the discussion.  They may want a… Read More

 Looker is trying to simplify the way companies use analytics and today it announced $48 million in Series C funding to continue the mission. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). Previous investors Redpoint Ventures, Meritech and Sapphire Ventures also participated. This round doubles their total raised to date to $96 million. This funding round comes less than… Read More

 Looker, a business intelligence startup co-founded by early lead engineer from Netscape and LiveOps Lloyd Tabb, has raised another $30 million in Series B funding, money that co-founder and CEO Frank Bien says will be used to invest in growing the company’s technology organically — not by acquisition. “We’re a tech company and will continue to lead with… Read More