Looker Data Sciences Inc. today said it has closed a late-stage financing round of $103 million, bringing its total funding to $280.5 million.

This latest round should take the company through to break-even cash flow, an event that Chief Executive Frank Bien (pictured) said is likely within the next two years.

The Series E investment round was led by led by PremjiInvest, a late-stage venture capital and private equity firm based in Bangalore, India. It was joined by Cross Creek Advisors and other current investors.

Looker has broken out of a crowded field of business intelligence startups with the promise of eliminating data extraction and preparation processes by querying multiple sources directly and making it easy to embed visualizations in other platforms.

“The BI and analytics space is a mess,” Bien said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. “There’s a proliferation of tools for visualization, data preparation, cataloging and the like and customers need to piece them together. Looker is about reducing the data supply chain.”

Looker said its revenues are up 70 percent this year on a tide of nearly 500 new customers. The company claims more than 185,000 subscribers to its software-as-a-service platform, representing about 1,600 companies. Looker employs 600 people, up by half from a year ago.

Having raised $233 million in just the last three years, the company should have more than it needs to fund for continuing operations, but Bien said acquisitions are not in the plans.

“We’re building a pretty pure platform and it needs to be our core intellectual property,” he said. There’s nothing magical about the $103 million figure. “We were pretty oversubscribed. It was a matter of keeping everybody happy,” he said.

Bien said he isn’t concerned about the roller-coaster ride the stock markets have been on lately, or about forecasts of a looming recession. “Great companies are made in a downturn,” he said, citing Salesforce.com Inc. and Google LLC, both of which rocketed out of the dot-com implosion.

He also left no doubt that Looker has its eyes on an initial public offering. “Quality companies can now stay private as long as they want to, but that can also lead to bad behavior,” he said. “When you’re looking at public markets, you need a certain maturity.”

Photo: Looker