UPDATED 09:12 EST / NOVEMBER 27 2012

The Science of Sentiment is Big Business in the Valley

While many tech startups are attracting less VC attention than they once did, analytics firm Lattice Engines has had few problems gaining adoration from investors.  The predictive analytics seller received $20 million in a Series C funding round.   New Enterprise Associates (NEA) led the round, and existing investor Sequoia Capital chipped in as well.

The San Mateo, CA-based Lattice sells predictive analytics software for marketers. Its flagship offering is salesPRISM, a platform that aggregates data streams and allows enterprises to get a feel for what their consumers are after. The company says that client organizations have managed to increase their pipeline by up to 75 percent, triple conversation rates and double cross-selling, all thanks to its technology.

“”The era of Big Data has arrived for sales and marketing,” said Shashi Upadhyay, CEO of Lattice. “By combining data from internal and external sources with high powered predictive analytics, our customers can predict buyer intent at an individual level, converting Big Data into big sales. Our customers are asking us for a comprehensive platform that can address all their analytical needs related to sales and marketing.”

New Enterprise Associations bought itself a stake in more than a few Silicon Valley success stories, including Box, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM and Workday. Lattice is hoping to become the first big data vendor on this list, and NEA general partner Pete Sonsini is joining its board to make sure that ends up happening.

Analytics is huge, and organizations – vendors, clients and VCs alike – are all willing to invest a lot of money to get in on the action.

Last week a company called WANdisco acquired AltoStor for $5 million, a startup co-founded by two of the original creators of Hadoop. It’s unclear whether this was mostly a talent buy or if WANdisco, a maker of clustering software, was after the technology. It’s likely a little bit of both.


Since you’re here …

… We’d like to tell you about our mission and how you can help us fulfill it. SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s business model is based on the intrinsic value of the content, not advertising. Unlike many online publications, we don’t have a paywall or run banner advertising, because we want to keep our journalism open, without influence or the need to chase traffic.The journalism, reporting and commentary on SiliconANGLE — along with live, unscripted video from our Silicon Valley studio and globe-trotting video teams at theCUBE — take a lot of hard work, time and money. Keeping the quality high requires the support of sponsors who are aligned with our vision of ad-free journalism content.

If you like the reporting, video interviews and other ad-free content here, please take a moment to check out a sample of the video content supported by our sponsors, tweet your support, and keep coming back to SiliconANGLE.