Sisense joins the unicorn club after raising $100M+ in funding to accelerate innovation and expand its global reach

Sisense, an Israeli business intelligence software provider, has officially joined the startup unicorn club after the company announced this week that it raised over $100 million in new funding. The round, which now values Sisense at over $1 billion, was led by Insight Venture Partner. Other backers include new investor Access Industries (via its Israeli vehicle Claltech), and existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, DFJ Growth, and others.

The startup plans to use the funding proceeds to accelerate innovation and scale across the globe. The new funding will also bolster the company’s sales, marketing and development efforts to increase market share, and accelerate investment in its platform. Back in May 2019 acquired Periscope Data, a U.S. provider of analytics for cloud data professionals to further boost its service offerings.

Founded in 2004 by Adi Azaria, Aviad Harell, Elad Israeli, Eldad Farkash, and Guy Boyangu, Sisense enables non-technical users to join and analyze large data sets. and lets builders collaborate on a single platform. Sisense lets builders collaborate on a single platform, delivered in a hybrid, cloud-native environment with the industry’s lowest cost of ownership, to create true democratization of data and analytics.

The company empowers the builders of analytic apps with powerful tools to simplify complex data and deliver insights to everyone inside and outside their organizations. It uses artificial intelligence algorithms to analyze organizational data. The company dramatically accelerates the time it takes to build, embed and deploy intelligent analytic apps that unleash user creativity and engagement. Sisense’s platform is used by more than 2,000 customers across the globe, including industry leaders like Tinder, Philips, Nasdaq, and the Salvation Army.

“We have enjoyed watching the Sisense momentum in the past 12 months, the traction from its customers as well as from industry leading analysts for the company’s cloud native platform and new AI capabilities. That coupled with seeing more traction and success with leading companies in our portfolio and outside, led us to want to continue and grow our relationship with the company and lead this funding round,” said Jeff Horing, Managing Director at Insight Venture Partners.

“Given our investments in market leading companies across diverse industries, we realize the value in analytics and machine learning and we could not be more excited about Sisense’s trajectory and traction in the market,” said Daniel Shinar, who leads Access Industries’ investments in Israel. Access Industries (the owner of the Warner Music Group among other investments) is a privately-held group based in the U.S. with strategic and diversified investments of over $20B in value. “Sisense is the clear leading analytics platform for builders and we’re excited to be part of their journey for many years to come.”

“With annual recurring revenues of over $100 million for fiscal year 2019, and more than 2,000 customers ranging from Expedia to Philips, Tinder to Nasdaq, and the Salvation Army, we have demonstrated market success, scale and traction,” said Amir Orad, CEO at Sisense. “We are honored to have these reputable investment partners support our growth strategy and continue on our fast track.”

Sisense was recently named a leader among enterprise business intelligence platforms in the latest Forrester Wave, as an industry leader in business intelligence in Dresner’s Wisdom of Crowds study and hailed by Gartner as a visionary in the Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence, holding the highest market position for customer satisfaction from an analytics platform.