Cloud analytics startup Sigma Computing raises $300 mln

Sigma Computing, the cloud analytics and business intelligence (BI) innovator, announced today it has raised $300M in Series C financing. D1 Capital Partners and XN co-led the round with returning investors Sutter Hill Ventures and Altimeter Capital, and an investment from Snowflake Ventures. To date, Sigma Computing has raised $381.3M to enable business and technical users to analyze data securely and at scale with the simplicity of a spreadsheet interface.

Sigma Computing is changing the future of work by accelerating the speed at which decisions are made. It reinvented the business intelligence category by empowering business users to explore live data and collaboratively build models and dashboards. While expanding data access to the broader enterprise, Sigma improves both performance and security through its unique architecture, which exclusively retains data in cloud warehouses like Snowflake. By putting billions of rows of live data directly into the hands of marketers, analysts, product managers, and other cross-functional business team members, real-time decisions can be made on critical business processes in supply chain, customer engagement, budgeting and more. Its easy-to-use collaboration features further empower the enterprise by ensuring these decisions involve all necessary organizations. Sigma customers find answers to ad hoc questions in seconds, iterate and interact on analyses, share narratives in one unified place, and make data-driven decisions in moments, not weeks.

The company is one of the first to be purpose-built for Snowflake and is an Elite partner of Snowflake. Customers such as US Foods, Blackstone, Athenahealth, and others have implemented its platform “Workbooks” to respond to customers quickly, approve transactions, increase supply chain efficiency and more.

“Sigma has allowed us to understand what’s possible as we unlock the true potential of our data,” said US Foods VP of Analytics & Data Science Chuck Sample. “As a leading foodservice distributor, partnering with approximately 300,000 restaurants and foodservice operators, being able to quickly manage service levels across our customer base is fundamental to meeting our client obligations. With Sigma, we have been able to significantly reduce the time it takes to garner insights on the fly while allowing both the business and BI teams to function at a higher level.”

“The delta between an enterprise’s performance and its potential is the speed and accuracy of the decisions it makes across its organization,” said Sigma Computing CEO Mike Palmer. “We are erasing that delta for competitive companies that want to arm their departments — from operations, finance, marketing and beyond — with the data they need to make decisions quickly and without frustrating delays and dependencies.”

Sigma was founded in 2014 to meet the needs of analysts who work with spreadsheets and want to use data in Snowflake, thus removing the technical hurdles of developing on visualization tools in SQL to run specific big data queries. Today, Sigma provides a unified collaborative canvas that combines spreadsheets, charts, and narratives, keeping all data projects synchronized in a single, self-contained platform for easy collaboration across an organization. Sigma’s tools allow users to drill down into data anywhere on a dashboard and calculate any inquiry against billions of rows of live data with no coding required. The company’s highly responsive UX also allows cross-functional teams to directly conduct ad hoc analytics for the most granular-level insights in milliseconds instead of hours. With Sigma, users can find immediate answers to their data questions without going through their BI team, and can embed Workbooks to easily share with authorized users.

“We founded Sigma with the promise of removing the timely and costly bottleneck that came with having to work in code to actually leverage large data warehouses for business intelligence,” said Sigma Computing CTO and Co-Founder Rob Woollen. “Overcoming these technical challenges with accessible no-code Workbooks met that promise, easing processes for large organizations and allowing decision-makers to pull insights directly in real-time while also making this technology accessible and scalable for anyone to use.” CT Bureau