‘Data Wrangling’ Firm Trifacta Raises $100M In Funding

The financing round brings the data preparation software vendor’s total financing to more than $224 million and will help the company grow sales and marketing efforts.

Trifacta has raised $100 million in a new round of financing the data preparation software developer will use to expand its sales and marketing efforts into new geographies and new vertical markets.

The Series E funding, which brings Trifacta’s total financing to $224.3 million, comes as the company reports that the number of users of the company’s software has tripled in the last year.

Cleaning and preparing raw data for use in business analytics, artificial intelligence and other applications is one of the biggest “big data” challenges businesses face. Trifacta’s “data wrangling” software, with its automated data engineering and data quality capabilities, makes it possible for everyday business users to perform more data refining tasks themselves and be less dependent on data preparation experts.

[Related: The Big Data 100 2019]

“For the last decade, companies have been trying to become more data driven, but most organizations have done little to enable people to get past all of the data friction that prevents them from asking and answering the most interesting questions,” said Trifacta CEO Adam Wilson in a statement. “By automating complex data engineering tasks and enabling increased levels of self-service, Trifacta ensures organizations can harness the collective intelligence of their teams and make everyone a data hero.”

The funding round included new investors Telstra Ventures, Energy Impact Partners, NTT Docomo Ventures, BMWi Ventures and ABN AMRO Digital Impact Fund. It also included additional funding from existing investors Accel Partners, Cathay Innovation, Google, Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners and Infosys.

Trifacta had previously raised $124.3 million in earlier rounds of financing, according to Crunchbase, including a $48 million Series D funding round in January 2018.

Trifacta said that in addition to providing funding, some of the new investors will be instrumental in helping the company expand into new sales areas. NTT Docomo, for example, will provide access to new customers in Asia Pacific while Telstra will help Trifacta penetrate the telecommunications space. BMW, Energy Impact Partners and ABN AMRO Digital Impact Fund will provide expansion opportunities in the automotive, energy, utilities and banking markets, respectively.

Poor quality data is frequently cited as the cause of business analytics projects that generate poor results. Data quality issues are also seen as a hindrance to artificial intelligence and machine learning projects and digital transformation initiatives.

In February, Trifacta reported that in its fiscal 2019, ended Jan. 31, the company’s annual recurring revenue grew 85 percent and cloud-based revenue more than doubled.