Startup profile for Platfora: latest funding, latest known valuation, total disclosed funding, investors, status, sources, and why the company is interesting. Part of the Venture Capital Tracker startup directory.
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Platfora funding, valuation and investors

Hadoop-native BI for petabyte-scale data — acquired by SAP in 2016.

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Funding, valuation & investors

Answer-first snapshot

Latest funding

Series C

$38M · March 2014

Latest known valuation

Not publicly disclosed

Total disclosed equity funding

$38M

Excludes debt, grants, acquisitions, secondaries, and IPO proceeds.

Current status

acquired

acquired

Investors in latest funding

Lead: Tenaya Capital

Other: Battery Ventures , Andreessen Horowitz , In-Q-Tel

Sources: latest funding Last verified: 2026-07-25

Overview

Platfora built business-intelligence software that ran analytics directly on Hadoop data lakes without ETL into separate warehouses. Founded by Ben Werther, the company targeted petabyte-scale exploratory BI for enterprises still committed to Hadoop clusters. Battery Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and In-Q-Tel participated across earlier rounds; Tenaya Capital led a $38M Series C in March 2014 with those firms re-upping. SAP acquired Platfora in 2016 to bolster cloud big-data analytics against Tableau and integrate in-lake querying into its enterprise stack. The Hadoop-native thesis lost ground as Snowflake and cloud warehouses moved analytics off on-prem clusters.

Why Platfora is interesting

Ben Werther's in-situ Hadoop analytics attracted Battery, a16z, and In-Q-Tel before Tenaya led $38M Series C — SAP bought the stack to compete with Tableau as cloud warehouses began displacing Hadoop clusters.

Product & use cases

Native analytics engine on Hadoop — visual exploration, dashboards, and SQL-like querying on petabyte data lakes without moving data to a separate warehouse.

  • Petabyte-scale Hadoop analytics without ETL
  • Enterprise data-lake exploratory BI
  • Security and intelligence workloads on Hadoop (In-Q-Tel backing signal)

Key facts

  • Series C (Mar 2014): $38M led by Tenaya; Battery, a16z, In-Q-Tel participated (TechCrunch)
  • Total funding ~$40M+ through Series C per contemporaneous press
  • Exit (2016): Acquired by SAP for big-data BI integration (TechCrunch / SAP press)

Funding history (newest first)

Series C

2014-03 $38M

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/05/platfora-raises-38m-series-c/

Investors in our directory

Funds linked from Platfora's profile — open a fund page for stage focus and related deal articles.

Andreessen Horowitz Battery Ventures In-Q-Tel

Competitive landscape

Edge: In-situ Hadoop analytics reduced data-movement cost and latency when enterprises still centralized on-prem big-data clusters — differentiated from warehouse-first BI.

Platfora bet that Hadoop co-location would win against moving data to BI servers. Tableau owned visualization mindshare but often sat atop extracted subsets. As Snowflake and cloud ELT matured, the cost of keeping analytics on Hadoop rose and SAP's acquisition became the logical exit. Platfora's story mirrors the broader Hadoop decline — technology was sound for its era but market architecture shifted underneath it.

  • Tableau incumbent

    Dominant BI leader; typically connected to curated warehouses rather than native Hadoop execution.

  • Cloudera adjacent

    Hadoop distribution vendor with overlapping enterprise data-lake buyers.

  • Snowflake incumbent

    Cloud warehouse shift pulled analytics off Hadoop — structural headwind to Platfora's core thesis.

Notable stories

  • In-Q-Tel's participation signaled intelligence-community interest in Hadoop-native analytics on massive unstructured datasets (TechCrunch Series C coverage).
  • SAP's 2016 acquisition positioned Platfora as big-data BI ammunition against Tableau inside SAP's cloud analytics roadmap — the same year Hadoop hype began yielding to cloud warehouses.

Industries

Enterprise SaaS AI & Machine Learning

Related funding articles

Venture Capital Tracker pieces that cover Platfora's financing or category context.

FAQs about Platfora

Practical answers founders, operators, and investors typically search for.

Hadoop-native business intelligence — analytics on petabyte data lakes without separate warehouse ETL.
SAP in 2016 to integrate big-data analytics into its cloud BI stack.
Battery, a16z, and In-Q-Tel among backers in the $38M Series C. See /fund/andreessen-horowitz and /fund/battery-ventures.
Platfora executed on Hadoop clusters; Tableau was broader BI typically fed by extracted datasets.
March 2014 — $38M led by Tenaya Capital.
Ben Werther led the company as founder/CEO per press coverage.
To add in-lake big-data BI capabilities and compete with Tableau on large-scale analytics.
Cloud data warehouses largely replaced standalone Hadoop BI stacks for new deployments.
$38M Series C was the largest disclosed round; total funding was roughly $40M+ per contemporaneous reports.
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