Big data technologies like Hadoop, HBase, Redshift, Vertica and others store ever greater quantities of data. As the capacity to store this data increases, so does the importance of extracting value and insight from it.

Big data adoption is a four step process: generate data, store data, hire specialists to analyze the data, and finally democratize data exploration. Today, businesses lack great data exploration tools. Looker has built those tools.

Two hours before a meeting with the Looker team, I sent them a sizable data set. During the pitch, Lloyd Tab, Looker’s founder, grouped, pivoted and drilled into the data. He said to me, “I’ve bet you’ve never really understood your data before I showed it to you on Looker.” And I agreed with him.

Looker is the tool to drive the critical last step of big data adoption. Looker enables anyone within an organization to ask and answer questions of their company’s data. That’s why we invested.

It’s rare for us to hear as persistent a refrain as the excitement among Looker’s customers, especially at such an early stage. From a portfolio company which exclusively powers its operations-heavy business on Looker, to a travel company whose sales team adopted the product and became profitable overnight, Looker customers consistently operate their businesses more effectively with Looker.

The team at Looker, especially Frank Bien and Lloyd Tab, have deep domain expertise. They worked through data challenges at LiveOps and Greenplum. Distilled from those experiences, Looker’s product enables companies to model, explore and explain data to make better decisions.

New database technologies underpin Looker’s product. As Lloyd eloquently wrote in “Business Intelligence and the Elephant’s Chain,” innovations in MPP relational databases, SQL interfaces to non-relational data stores and exponential growth in computational power enable Looker’s infinite resolution business intelligence.

We are excited to partner with the Looker team and help catalyze the democratization of data exploration.