Alteryx, an Irvine-based firm whose stated goal is to “humanize” Big Data, just raised $12 million in financing from SAP Ventures and Toba Capital, a recently established VC led by Quest Software founder Vinny Smith. This latest round brings the company’s total funding to $18 million.

“SAP Ventures saw the potential in Alteryx in 2011 when we first invested in the company, and we’ve watched this company thrive and bring continued value to its extensive customer base,” said Jai Das, managing director with SAP Ventures and an Alteryx board member. “Alteryx is one of the few analytics platform providers which has the right mix of cloud, Big Data and predictive analytics capabilities to be able to leverage the massive changes in the analytics market and grow rapidly to become one of the leading analytics companies.”

Alteryx’s edge over the competition is that its platform doesn’t require users to possess any programming skills. The solution ingests Big Data from a variety of different sources and serves it up within a highly abstracted environment that’s designed for “data artists” rather than statisticians and database experts. This simplified approach has two main advantages: it lowers overheads, and it allows analysts to act upon data much quicker than before.

Big Data abstraction has become a top priority for vendors in the wake of the technology’s increased popularity among organizations that don’t have the budget to support a resident team of data scientists. A recent survey commissioned by Kapow found that 81 percent of organizations struggle with manual data aggregation, and 85 percent of IT and business leaders believe Big Data should be more consumable. Over 90 percent of non-technical professionals think that their IT departments could do a better job at automating this task.