Looker Data Sciences, Inc. is an American

computer software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

company headquartered in

Santa Cruz, California Santa Cruz (Spanish for "Holy Cross") is the county seat and largest city of Santa Cruz County, in Northern California. As of the 2020 census, the city population was 62,956. Situated on the northern edge of Monterey Bay, Santa Cruz is a pop ...

. It was acquired by

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

in 2019 and is now part of the

Google Cloud Platform Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Drive, and YouTube. Alongside ...

. Looker markets a data exploration and discovery

business intelligence Business intelligence (BI) comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical pr ...

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 onc ...

, 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. 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 t ...

relational database management systems A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relatio ...

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 acquire ...

, Google

BigQuery BigQuery is a fully managed, serverless data warehouse that enables scalable analysis over petabytes of data. It is a ''Platform as a Service'' (PaaS) that supports querying using ANSI SQL. It also has built-in machine learning capabilities. Big ...

, HP

Vertica Vertica Systems is an analytic database management software company. Vertica was founded in 2005 by the database researcher Michael Stonebraker, with Andrew Palmer as the founding CEO. Ralph Breslauer and Christopher P. Lynch served as later ...

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 uses including enterprise data warehousing, busines ...

, and

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

. On August 13, 2013, Looker announced a Series A round of funding from

Redpoint Ventures Redpoint Ventures is an American venture capital firm focused on investments in seed, early and growth-stage companies. History The firm was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, with offices in San Francisco, Los Ange ...

, 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 is a venture capital firm that specializes in providing seed-stage funding to technology companies. Founded by Josh Kopelman Joshua Kopelman is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist. Kopelman is best ...

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 entrepreneurs ...

. At that time, the company estimated 450 customers, including

Jet.com Jet.com was an American e-commerce company headquartered in Hoboken, New Jersey. The company was co-founded in 2014 by Marc Lore (who had previously sold Diapers.com to Amazon.com), along with Mike Hanrahan and Nate Faust. Jet.com raised $820 mi ...

. 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. 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 - announced his departure from the company.

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 is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relatio ...

work,

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

References

External links

* {{Google LLC Data visualization software Business intelligence software Google acquisitions Business intelligence companies 2019 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 Software companies of the United States Google Cloud Business services companies disestablished in the 21st century Business analysis Big data companies