Looker has closed an $81.5 million Series D funding round led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth equity investment fund.

Looker’s core expertise is in SQL. Its technology allows users to easily connect to databases — regardless of location — and aggregate data from across multiple databases. Its platform furthermore includes a set of tools that customers can use to perform more sophisticated data manipulation than historically available.

The company has partnerships with almost every major database company, including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Amazon, Cloudera, Databricks, Hortonworks, Treasure Data, HP, Teradata, and – not coincidentally – Google.

It's working specifically with Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP) operation, a Looker spokesperson told SDxCentral. As network storage becomes continuously less expensive, more companies are moving their data to the cloud. “And that’s a perfect time for us to engage with companies – when they’re moving to the cloud,” said the spokesperson.

The trend is being accelerated by cloud companies introducing databases built for the cloud. Amazon’s Redshift and Snowflake’s eponymous data warehouse solutions are two examples. Looker was the first business analytics firm to support both Google’s Cloud Spanner relational database service and Amazon’s Athena serverless interactive query service, the Looker spokesperson claimed.

In 2016, Looker’s revenue nearly tripled while adding almost 400 new customers, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Amazon Prime Now, Square, and Giphy. The business intelligence (BI) market is itself growing. It’s opened opportunities for new companies like Looker, Tableau, and Qlik, who are competing with BI vendors of longer standing such as IBM/Cognos and Microstrategy.

Other participants in Looker’s Series D were new investors Geodesic Capital and Goldman Sachs as well as previous investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Meritech Capital Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and Sapphire Ventures. Looker has raised a total of $177.5 million since 2013.

It said it will use the proceeds for product development and for additional investments in integration with other database technologies in the market. The company said it intends to also accelerate its investments in sales and marketing and continue international expansion, including Asia Pacific.