Even with all the collaboration tools that are available to companies these days, coordinating the different personnel who take part in a large-scale analytics project can still be difficult. One of the startups working to ease the task is the New York-based Dataiku Inc., which raised $14 million in funding today from a group of backers led by FirstMark Capital LLC.

The cash will be used to widen the adoption of its namesake business intelligence platform, which was specifically built with the interdisciplinary nature of analytics teams in mind. Its most distinguishing feature is a two-layered interface called “Click or Code” that aims to eliminate the inefficient back-and-forth normally involved in data science initiatives. Its first component, the “Click” part, packs visual controls that enable the business workers who lead an analytics project to quickly put together a proof-of-concept.

The feature saves those professionals the hassle of manually communicating their requirements to their technically minded peers, wait for them to produce an implementation and then slowly work out the issues together. Instead, the Dataiku Data Science Platform makes it possible to quickly import the records that are needed for a project using pre-integrated connectors and provides point-and-click controls to help users process them. The results can then be visualized using one of its 25 built-in chart templates.

Once a prototype is more or less complete, workers can hand over their work to the data science team, which is able to make enhancements using the development interface in DSS. Dataiku says that the platform offers the ability to create custom graphs and refine the data they display using various third-party technologies such as the H2O machine learning framework. Moreover, it can offload the computational heavy-lifting involved in the process to a company’s backend analytics environment to reduce loading times.

Rounding out the platform is a set of collaboration features that lets workers create shared to-do lists, quickly post new requirements and write documentation for peers. Dataiku says that DSS is used at more than 100 companies ranging from small businesses to large enterprises such as Bechtel Corp., the largest construction company in the US. Unusually for an early-stage startup, it claims it’s already profitable.

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