Looker (company)


Looker Data Sciences was an American computer software company headquartered in Santa Cruz, California before it was acquired by Google Cloud Platform. Looker marketed a data exploration and discovery business intelligence platform.

History

The company was founded in Santa Cruz, California in January, 2012 by Lloyd Tabb and Ben Porterfield. The product grew out of Tabb's experience building software at companies like Netscape, 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 without needing to know SQL.
The product was the first commercially available business intelligence platform built for and aimed at scalable or massively parallel relational database management systems like Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, HP Vertica, Netezza, and Teradata.
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 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. 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. 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.