Data visualization company Periscope Data has announced $25 million in additional funding led by existing investor DFJ. Prior to the latest funding, the company was reportedly valued at $100 million.
This new funding follows Periscope Data’s Series A round, which brought in $9.5 million. The company’s website says its other backers include Data Collective, Google (News - Alert) Ventures, SUSA Ventures, and SVAngel, and it lists various industry leaders such as Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer.
The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2012 by former Google employee Harry Glaser, who is now Periscope Data CEO, and Tom O’Neill, a former Microsoft (News - Alert) program manager, who is credited with inventing the Periscope Data solution. That solution, the company says, allows data scientists to build customized visualizations (from data sources such as Amazon Redshift, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Salesforce) 150 times more quickly than any other data visualization tools.
That’s quite a claim, given the broad array of data visualization tools on the market. In a piece for Creative Bloq, Brian Suda, author of Designing with Data, lists some of those tools as Better World Flux, Charts.js, D2.js, Dipity, Dygraphs, Exhibit, FusionCharts, InstantAtlas, JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit, jpGraph, jqPlot, Leaflet, Modest Maps, Raw, Tableau, Timeline, Visualize Free, Visual.ly, WolframAlpha (News - Alert), and ZingChart.
A 2015 story in USA Today illustrates how such data visualization tools can come into play by offering Tableau user Ramon Martinez, a specialist in health metrics at the Pan American Health Organization, as an example. He used Tableau Public to offer visualizations of public health on his blog.
“Fifteen years ago, it was a dream to do the kind of things that I do today,” Martinez told USA Today. “Other tools that existed out there were very difficult to use, and for an audience that was specialized. You could only connect to local data or a specific data format, and it was almost impossible to share the results on the web in a fast way.”