Open source Business Intelligence firm Pentaho has taken $12 million Series C in a round led by Benchmark Capital. Previous investors Index Ventures and New Enterprise Associates also participated.
Pentaho offers commercial open source enterprise reporting, analysis, dashboard, data mining, workflow and ETL capabilities for Business Intelligence needs.
Orlando, Florida based Pentaho was founded in 2004 and has had three million lifetime downloads, with more than 20,000 registered community members. Pentaho’s customers include Cox Communications, Delta Dental, Lifetime Networks, Monsanto Corporation, Savvion, Sun Microsystems, Terra Industries, U.S. Naval Air Command, and Wachovia.
The additional funding will be used to continue Pentaho’s growth in the business intelligence market, including R&D and international expansion.
Papyrus font in the logo does not bode well for their decision-making.
Ha, Morgan beat me to it. Maybe they can use some of the $12 mil to replace the Papyrus in their logo.
Watch out Ab Initio and Informatica.
Looks like they have a very sound business model and a crapload of high flying clients.
http://www.whatshottoday.com
Congrats to Pentaho. Great to see Benchmark’s commitment to commercial open source.
Roy / Magento
http://www.magentocommerce.com
I’m not so keen on the name though. Pent-a-ho or Pen-tah-hoe? (I hope it’s the latter)
Hos gotta eat, too.
Awesome, i’ve been involved in several BI projects and I must say, one of the biggest barriers to adoption is the cost. If Pentaho can significantly reduce cost and offer superb support, they’d give Cognos, BO, SAS, etc. a good run for their money.
Does the name sound like it’s short for ‘pentahouse ho’ to anybody else?
These guys have been up and coming for a long time. With the BI industry consolidating its opening a huge window for open source to play a growing role. http://chriscro...t-took-so-long/
Thanks for all the great comments folks… It’s pronounced “pen-tah-hoe”… similar to “Lake Tahoe”…
I love that Tech Crunhc covers these kinds of stories. New startups, investment amounts, categorizes services etc. But I have always wondered why in the heck any startup needs 5, 12, or 30 million dollars in venture capital. It just seems absurd to need that much money for a web business model.
Rentaho has a catchier ring….
Oracle/Hyperion, IBM/Cognos, SAP/Business Objects.
how much more space of niches with similar product and suites?
stupid names
basically means Asshole in Spanish. Are they??
@Travis:
Bootstrapping and/or a small Series A can get you pretty far (even far enough), but if you’re building a specialty product, at some point you may realize that the path to real growth demands not just a great product/idea, but serious resources as well: product development, customer support, marketing, business development, operations, etc.
Growing pains abound. If you have your act together and can demonstrate that you can make effective use of the resources that the capital would provide, then the big bucks infusion may be the difference between success and stillbirth.
Many have done more with less, but not every web/software idea is an infinite audience, 80% margin enterprise. For every self-financed company that becomes a billion dollar behemoth, there are thousands of others that will need real cash to achieve even modest greatness. That’s just the way it is.
It’s not greed or wastefulness, in fact it’s the opposite.
This post is just a reprinted press release, why even bother?
I see Sun Microsystems buying out Pentaho, simply for the following reasons
1. Sun is acquiring MySQL ( one open source DB in their product line )
2. Just having a DB is no good. To stand up against Microsoft and IBM, Sun should be looking at a BI suite like Pentaho or similars.
3. Sun is already a OEM partner. Which means they have build products with tight integration to Pentaho.