Data visualization vendor Zoomdata raises $25 million

Zoomdata delivers a visual analytics solution. What that means in language understandable to the real world is that Zoomdata enables organizations to consume their data, formerly available in spreadsheets and incomprehensible feeds and streams, in a visual way. Zoomdata joins a number of other products, both pure-play and component part of broader platforms, in helping organizations understand data through visualizations. While visualizations are incredibly valuable, I always bristle a little bit when visualization vendors claim their product is analytic in nature. Analytic always meant something very different from simply drawing pretty pictures, and vendors applying the term to visualizations do little to make things clear for customers.

Anyway, that little bugbear aside, Zoomdata brings together disparate data sources - both modern and legacy - and blends them into a single unified database which can run on-premises, in the cloud, or embedded within an application. The company serves the enterprise and has customers such as Cisco, Deloitte, and Markerstudy. Zoomdata is also covering its bases in terms of industry partnerships - its cloud product runs on Amazon, CenturyLink, Cisco, DataBricks, Google and Microsoft Azure cloud platforms, and it has existing partnerships with Cisco, Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM and Microsoft, among others.

The company is today bucking the trend of funding shortfalls for early-stage companies and announcing a $25 million raise led by none other than Goldman Sachs. Alongside GS (or its Principal Strategic Investments Group), Comcast Ventures is joining in and previous investors Accel, Columbus Nova Technology Partners, and NEA also participated in the round.

This raise takes Zoomdata's total funding to just shy of $50 million to date - not bad for a company that was only launched in 2012. All of this is, of course, occurring under the cloud of a rapidly changing venture funding environment. That Zoomdata got this round away is a testament to how it is executing in the marketplace. Its challenge now is to hunker down and work out how to make that $25 million last as long as possible - predictions that the funding spigot will be turned off for all early-stage companies in the near future have increasingly made companies think about bigger existential moves.

One only hopes that Zoomdata avoids putting its newfound lucre into frivolous marketing spend, but rather thinks about smart expenditure and delivering real revenue growth.