When it comes to answers about basic business developments, most people are pretty impatient. Why should it take two or three days to gather analysis on sales over a specific timeframe, marketing campaigns, or other key business metrics? Seriously, who can afford to run a company that way?
Facebook-spawned Interana is one of several companies developing software to generate this sort of “event-based” or “time-based” perspective far more quickly. The two-year-old startup has scored early customers such as software company Asana and the Silicon Valley division of telecommunications operator Orange.
To that end, today it disclosed $20 million in Series B financing, led by Index Ventures, along with several other new investors, including Cloudera’s chief strategy officer, Mike Olson. The round bring total backing behind the company to slightly less than $30 million, said Interana CEO Ann Johnson.
Index Ventures general partner Mike Volpi is joining the company’s board as a result of the investment. He joins several other notable advisors, including Veritas Software founder Mark Leslie and Facebook’s vice president of engineering, Jeff Rothschild.
“What really sets Interana apart is that their solution combines pieces of a product that usually gets separated into different silos,” wrote Volpi in a blog post about the investment. “The current standard for big data analysis is for companies to pair a large data warehouse with some kind of graphical technology, and then manually run a long set of scripted queries to get the desired results. Interana has fundamentally gone against the grain of how people think about this system.”
Volpi was intrigued by the trio of entrepreneurs behind Interana: husband-and-wife team Bobby and Ann Johnson, who met at CalTech in the 1990s and most recently were with Facebook and Intel, respectively. The third founder is Lior Abraham, another Facebook alumnus, who developed the company’s internal analytics technology, called SCUBA. “That team really democratized the use of these tools more than others have,” he said.
“We want to eliminate long hallway discussions, and make it easier for people to get things done,” added CEO Ann Johnson.
The new money will be primarily dedicated to building Interana’s sales and marketing organization, expanding its product development resources, and developing more proof-of-concept installations, she said.
This item first appeared in the Jan. 21 edition of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the business of technology. Sign up here.
