Zoomdata, a company that’s trying to transform business intelligence by connecting to both modern and traditional data sources at scale, announced a $25 million Series C round today.
The investment was led by Goldman Sachs’ Principal Strategic Investments Group. New investor Comcast Ventures also participated along with prior investors Accel, Columbus Nova Technology Partners and NEA. With today’s take, Zoomdata has now raised just over $47 million, according to Crunchbase. The company’s most recent round prior to today was a $17 million Series B in October, 2014.
In a time where Series B and C money is getting harder to come by through conventional venture capital channels, it’s interesting that Zoomdata captured the interest of the strategic investment arm of Goldman Sachs and from Comcast Ventures, the venture arm of the cable giant.
Zoomdata provides companies with business intelligence dashboards connected to modern data sources like a Cloudera or Hortonworks Hadoop cluster, Elasticsearch and NoSQL sources. It also connects to  a more traditional SQL database sources, and it does all of this without creating a copy of the data to visualize it, reducing the risk associated with having copies of the data stored in various places.
The company competes in the BI market with traditional tools like IBM Cognos and SAP BusinessObjects or even somewhat more modern ones like Tableau and Qlik. Unlike those companies, which were born in the world of SQL and data warehouses with smaller data requirements , Zoomdata was built to deal with modern data sources like Hadoop and NoSQL and much larger data sets, CEO Justin Langseth told TechCrunch..
While Langseth acknowledged competitors have been adding support for newer data sources too, he said their older code base makes it more difficult to deal with big data scale.
The company actually began working with Goldman Sachs a year ago when company representatives “swarmed” the Zoomdata booth at the Spark Summit in New York City and began peppering them with questions, Langseth said.  Over the last year he’s met with Goldman officials a bunch of times, and over that time they’ve become a customer. While the product has met many of Goldman’s requirements, there were things it wanted  that the were missing. Today’s investment in Zoomdata is designed to help speed up the product road map and add those missing pieces that are important to this key customer.
Comcast, too is a customer, but Langseth said the Comcast Ventures investment was probably more financial than strategic.
As for his more traditional venture capitalist investors — they probably liked what they were seeing from the company in terms of growth including 11 X year over year growth, 35 customers (up from 20 during the 2014 round) and expanded partnerships with the likes of Cisco, Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM and Microsoft.
As part of the deal Rana Yared, managing director in the Principal Strategic Investments Group at Goldman Sachs, will join the Zoomdata board of directors.
It’s worth noting that this is the second Goldman Sachs Principal Strategic Investments Group investment we have reported on this month. They also led a $30 million investment in Sonatype.
