‘Big data made easy’ firm SiSense raises $30 million

SiSense, an Israeli big data start-up, announced this week that it raised $30 million in new financing. With hundreds of customers, including Target, eBay, ESPN, Samsung and Wix, the company said it “continues to aggressively expand customer acquisition worldwide. The latest round of funding will enable SiSense to expand its team, increase the company’s global footprint, and deliver technology that continues to challenge legacy business intelligence (BI) players.”

Venture capital firm DFJ Growth is leading the financing round, with participation from existing investors Battery Ventures, Genesis Partners and Opus Capital.

SiSense specializes in “big data” analytics, parsing through huge databases in order to extract meaningful information about almost anything. The company’s mission “is making big data analysis more accessible for the ‘common man,’” according to SiSense CEO Amit Bendov.

The company’s Prism analytics system, for example, enables super-fast analysis of data, even for users of processor- and memory-challenged laptops. Prism is a drag-and-drop system that lets users take bits of information (such as sales numbers and costs) and formulate complicated queries (such as the amount of sales per zip code, neighborhood or income level) without requiring programming or database querying. That means basically anyone can use it, said Bendov. The system can plug into databases of all types, including SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL, and produce reports and analytics on very large data sets on either local computers or servers, or using cloud applications. Prism can export information into reports, manage rights to data by user, customize displays and results, and more. SiSense gives the average user the tools to analyze huge reams of data without having to mortgage their businesses to hire a team of database specialists, said Bendov.

The firm updated the software earlier this year, making it even faster. “There’s a lot of hype around big data analytics, but even the biggest companies are struggling because of the massive infrastructure, budgets and specialized skills required. Our products level the big data playing field so that businesses of all sizes can get in the game,” said Bendov.

In another recent development, SiSense demonstrated that its system could zip through 10 terabytes of data (10,240 gigabytes, or 10485760 megabytes) on a single off-the-shelf Dell server in just 10 seconds, and give answers to business intelligence problems posed to it. The demonstration, at the Strata Big Data Conference held in Silicon Valley in 2013, merited SiSense the Audience Choice Award at the event. Last year was a banner year for the company, with revenue from sales up 300 percent for the third consecutive year, and the establishment of a US office in New York City, said Bendov.

“SiSense is leading a new generation of business intelligence and analytics applications with a technology that is robust and sophisticated yet simple to use,” said Randy Glein, managing director of DFJ Growth, who is joining SiSense’s board of directors. “SiSense allows business users to take advantage of big data and make sense of it instantaneously by revolutionizing the way enterprises gather and analyze information.  Customers rave about SiSense and its ability to easily integrate multiple data sources, scale far beyond competitive solutions and be adopted directly by business users with little to no support needed from IT specialists. With its unique technology and experienced leadership team, SiSense has rapidly emerged as a leader by disrupting legacy approaches that simply can’t match the scale or performance of this powerful BI platform.”

“We are honored by DFJ Growth’s confidence in our ground-breaking approach to business analytics,” said Bendov. “DFJ Growth has a reputation for identifying leading companies with disruptive technologies, such as Box, DataStax, SolarCity, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, Twitter, Yammer and other visionary leaders in its portfolio. We look forward to continuing to disrupt the status quo and shake up the archaic world of BI.”