Ex-Facebookers at Interana raise $20M for mass-scale event data
Interana, a Menlo Park, California, analytics startup that officially launched in October has closed a $20 million Series B round. Index Ventures led the round, which also included new investors AME Cloud Ventures, Harris Barton and Cloudera’s Mike Olson. Interana’s existing investors — Battery Ventures, Data Collective and Fuel Capital — from which the company had previously raised $8.2 million, also participated.
The idea behind Interana is to make Facebook-style event analytics, as well as a the same type of data-centric culture, available to all types of companies with lots of event data to analyze. To do this, Interana built an entire system from the ground up, from columnar storage engine to user interface.
A portion of the Interana dashboard.
It was founded by two former Facebook engineers, Bobby Johnson and Lior Abraham, who built some of Facebook’s most-popular internal analytics systems, and Ann Johnson. Ann, who is CEO, and Bobby, who is CTO, are married.
Since the company launched, Ann Johnson said in a recent interview, Interana has scored several new customers and received interest from very large and well-known companies. She chalks up the interest to a dearth of products addressing event analytics at scale — like years worth of it — and to data volumes that “are growing faster than many people’s intuitions even tell them.”
Ann Johnson
The hope for customers is that they query their data regularly and treat Interana’s product like they treat Google’s search engine by asking lots of small questions throughout the day, she added.
A good analytics practice, Bobby Johnson noted, is to make the interface easy enough that people don’t just look for that one big insight, but rather ask as many questions as they need to, about whatever they need to. “Anything that should be answered by data should be,” he said. That way, people can spend their time worrying about other stuff.
Bobby Johnson
To hear more about Interana’s product, as well as the experience of starting an enterprise software company with your spouse, check out our October podcast interview with Ann Johnson.
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