GoodData is a data analytics web solution, founded in the Czech Republic in 2007 by the serial entrepreneur Roman Stanek, which raised a total of $7 million funding up to the moment. If GoodData will be successful, this will mean the disruption of a billion dollar market: the data analytics.
Moving business intelligence and data analytics to the cloud
GoodData is a software-as-a-service complete business intelligence application, delivering a reporting tool, an on-demand analytics platform and a place to collaborate around data, all at the same time. In other words, GoodData is meant to be a new way of interacting with business data, helping business owners handle the day by day challenges of reporting and analysing business data.
From the beginning, GoodData has intended to do for dashboarding and data analytics what Amazon Web Services does for storage and compute resources. In other words, Stanek, who previously founded and sold NetBeans Inc. and Systinet Inc., is now aiming at the multi-billion dollar market of data analytics dominated by big players like SAP, IBM and Oracle. In comparison to the expensive solutions that these companies have to offer, GoodData is offered for free for the moment and it will probably come up with a usage fee in the near future, which will anyway be much lower that those of their competitors.
GoodData boasts to keeping their fixed costs down to a mininum as the application is using cloud computing entirely and running on Amazon web services.
Roman’s track record = a guarantee for GoodData’s success
GoodData raised a total of $2 million seed funding in july 2008 from Esther Dyson (chairman of EDVenture Holdings, third time investing in Roman Stanek’s businesses), Tim O’Reilly (CEO of O’Reilly Media) and Windcrest Partners. The business has closed a second round of financing of $2.5 million from Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, OATV and General Catalyst in april 2009 and a Series C funding of another $2.5 million from Andreessen Horowitz (a $300 million venture fund that was launched on July 2009) General Catalyst Partners and other undisclosed investors in october 2009. The Czech company has now raised a total of $7 million in capital.
The success GoodData has had with investors is in no way a surprise. Roman Stanek is what we could call “highly fundable” due to his serial entrepreneurship track record. Stanek sold NetBeans to Sun for $10 million and Systinet to Mercury Interactive/HP for $105 million.
