Google completes $2 billion acquisition of big-data analytics startup Looker

Google announced today it has completed $2 billion acquisition of big-data analytics startup Looker after green light from UK regulators. The Alphabet Inc-owned Google first announced the all cash deal back in June 2019. As part of the acquisition, Looker, a unified platform for business intelligence, data applications, and embedded analytics, joins the joined the Google Cloud.

The deal also builds upon the success of Google Cloud’s BigQuery, a tool for managing large datasets. Looker’s tool enables analysts and other workers to define calculations for items such as revenue or high-value customers and then visualize trends in their data without writing complicated scripts. Looker competes with Tableau Software Inc DATA.N, Domo Inc, and Microsoft’s Power BI.

Founded in 2011 Ben Porterfield, Lloyd Tabb, and Marc Randolph, the Santa Cruz, California Looker provides business intelligence software to make data accessible to organizations and data analysts. Looker’s product grew out of Tabb’s experience building software at companies like Netscape, LiveOps, and Luminate before founding Looker. Before the acquisition, Looker raised a total of $280.5M in funding over 7 rounds. Its latest funding was raised on Dec 31, 2018 from a Secondary Market round.

Looker makes use of a simple modeling language called LookML that lets data teams define the relationships in their database so business users can explore, save, and download data without needing to know SQL. The product was the first commercially available business intelligence platform built for and aimed at scalable or massively parallel relational database management systems like Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, HP Vertica, Netezza, and Teradata.