Looker Data Sciences, Inc. is an American

computer software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

company headquartered in

Santa Cruz, California Santa Cruz (Spanish language, Spanish for "Holy Cross") is the largest city and the county seat of Santa Cruz County, California, Santa Cruz County, in Northern California. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, the city population ...

. It was acquired by

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

in 2019 and is now part of the

Google Cloud Platform Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google that provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, Computer data storage, data storage, Data analysis, data analytics, and machine learnin ...

. Looker markets a data exploration and discovery

business intelligence Business intelligence (BI) consists of strategies, methodologies, and technologies used by enterprises for data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of BI technologies include Financial reporting, reporting, online an ...

platform.

History

The company was founded in Santa Cruz, California in January, 2012 by Lloyd Tabb and Ben Porterfield and occupied the historic Rittenhouse building there. The product grew out of Tabb's experience building software at companies like

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was o ...

, LiveOps, and Luminate before founding Looker. Looker makes use of a simple modeling language called LookML that lets data teams define the relationships in their database so business users can explore, save, and download data with only a basic understanding of

SQL Structured Query Language (SQL) (pronounced ''S-Q-L''; or alternatively as "sequel") is a domain-specific language used to manage data, especially in a relational database management system (RDBMS). It is particularly useful in handling s ...

. The product was the first commercially available

platform built for and aimed at scalable or

massively parallel Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of ...

relational database management systems A relational database (RDB) is a database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) is a type of database management system that stores data in a structured form ...

Amazon Redshift Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse product which forms part of the larger cloud-computing platform Amazon Web Services. It is built on top of technology from the massive parallel processing (MPP) data warehouse company ParAccel (later acqui ...

, Google BigQuery, HP Vertica,

Netezza IBM Netezza (pronounced ne-teez-a) is a subsidiary of American technology company IBM that designs and markets high-performance data warehouse appliances and advanced analytics applications for the most demanding analytic uses including enterpr ...

, and

Teradata Teradata Corporation is an American software company that provides cloud database and Analytics, analytics-related software, products, and services. The company was formed in 1979 in Brentwood, California, as a collaboration between researchers a ...

. On June 21, 2016, Looker celebrated the release of ''Winning With Data'', a book coauthored by Looker CEO, Frank Bien and Redpoint Partner, Tomasz Tunguz. On June 6, 2019, Google announced it was acquiring Looker for $2.6 billion. The acquisition was finalized February 2020. In March 2022, Looker's CEO, Frank Bien, left Google Cloud.

Funding

On August 13, 2013, Looker announced a Series A round of funding from Redpoint Ventures, First Round Capital, and PivotNorth Capital, raising more than $18M. Prior to the Series A round, Looker raised $2M in a seed round from

First Round Capital First Round Capital is a US-based venture capital firm that specializes in providing seed-stage funding to technology companies. Founded by Josh Kopelman and Howard Morgan First Round typically provides seed-stage funding and focuses on po ...

and PivotNorth Capital. On March 11, 2015, Looker raised $30M in series B funding. In July, 2015, Jen Grant joined as chief marketing officer, and the company estimated it has 140 employees. On January 14, 2016, Looker raised $48M in series C funding from

Kleiner Perkins Kleiner Perkins, formerly Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), is an American venture capital firm which specializes in investing in incubation, early stage and growth companies. Since its founding in 1972, the firm has backed entrepreneur ...

. At that time, the company estimated 450 customers, including Jet.com. On March 30, 2017, Looker raised $81.5M in series D funding led by Capital G. On December 6, 2018, Looker raised $103M in series E funding led by Premji Invest.

Under Google Cloud Platform

The Looker Platform for Data operates today as a part of Google Cloud Platform and offers a wide variety of tools for

relational database A relational database (RDB) is a database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) is a type of database management system that stores data in a structured for ...

work,

, and other related services. Looker's 2019 revenue is estimated to be about $140 million.

References

External links

* {{Google LLC Data and information visualization software Business intelligence software Google acquisitions Business intelligence companies 2020 mergers and acquisitions Business services companies established in 2012 Software companies established in 2012 Software companies based in California Data warehousing products Companies based in Santa Cruz, California 2012 establishments in California Defunct software companies of the United States Google Cloud Business services companies disestablished in the 21st century Business analysis Big data companies