SiSense, a business intelligence startup based in Tel Aviv, announced yesterday that it has raised $30 million in Series C funding. The round was led by DFJ Growth and included participation from existing backers Battery Ventures, Genesis Partners and Opus Capital.
The company’s software is designed to make big data analytics easier for ordinary, non-technical business users. Workers can combine data from multiple sources for analysis, create visualisations and web-based dashboards, and gain insights through both mobile and desktop devices. In February, the company released SiSense 5 with new functions and capabilities for analysing terabytes of data on mobile devices.
Although the analytics company has considerable competition in this field – including Tableau, Qlik, Birst, DataRPM, BIME Analytics, to name just a few – SiSense’s CEO, Amit Bendob, said,
“Traditional BI software is robust but complicated and not too user friendly. Then the newer generation, like Qlik or Tableau, are much easier to use but they can’t handle the range of requirements that the older tools have,” he said.
Indeed, SiSense’s recent funding round is another sign of how next-generation business analytics software companies – like the ones mentioned above – are challenging established products like SAP’s Business Objects, IBM’s Cognos, and Oracle.
“We’re not going head-to-head against SAP HANA or Oracle,” said Bruno Aziza, SiSense’s former vice president of marketing, in an interview with SilinconANGLE. “Most of the people who can afford solutions like that have a lot of time, a lot of money and big teams. And it turns out that’s probably 500 companies.”
As such, SiSense claims that its software makes business analytics financially viable for a “much broader range of organizations through the use of a homegrown columnar database that utilizes CPU cache, RAM or disk depending on which resource type is most appropriate for the specific task at hand.”
Among the 500 customers of SiSense are eBay, Target, Samsung Electronics and ESPN. The company said that the money from the funding round would be used to grow its workforce, expand into new markets and build its customer base.
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