While companies spend trillions of dollars on big data technologies to compile, store, and deliver the volumes of data they’re collecting and the software and services that they have to make sense of that data once it’s collected, there’s a divide that separates the two parts of the process.
San Francisco, Calif.-based Trifacta is selling a software that purports to bridge that divide and has raised $25 million in new financing to grow its business. by expanding its sales and marketing efforts to pitch its wares to more customers.
With the latest Series C round, which was led by Ignition Partners and included previous investors Greylock Partners  and Accel Partners, Trifacta has raised over $40 million dollars to bring its data transformation technology to market. 
Born out of research from the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford, and the University of Washington  Joe Hellerstein, Sean Kandel, and Jeffrey Heer founded Trifacta in 2012 as a way to approach the bottlenecks in data analytics from a human perspective, according to Hellerstein, the company’s chief executive. 
“The mission for Trifacta, in essence, based on that line of questioning was how can we radically improve the way people work with data,” Hellerstein says. The universities’ research indicated that data transformation was the key bottleneck, so that was where Berkeley’s Hellerstein and his research partners at Stanford focused their efforts. 
The end result is a software that automates the process of transforming data from database sources like Hadoop into something that can be easily digested by software visualization and business intelligence tools. 
“We give you a dropdown of steps you might want to take to manipulate that data,” says Hellerstein. “When you’re done you’ve essentially written a program, and that code is something we can compile and launch on a big data environment.”
Hellerstein wouldn’t talk about the number of companies using the software now, but says that customers are coming from both government and the private sector in industries like media, healthcare and information technology. 
One customer that is using the software and not afraid to admit it is Lockheed Martin. A healthcare focused initiative within the company is using Trifacta to speed up its data analysis. According to Hellerstein, the company has reduced the time it takes to conduct data analysis from six weeks to a single day. 
Pricing for the company’s technology is based on the volume of data a company processes using the Trifacta software, and typically starts at roughly $100,000 to $150,000.  
Photo via Flickr user JD Hancock
