Even more difficult than taming vast amounts of information from an almost as expansive array of sources in a controlled  environment that allows for further processing is turning raw output into useful knowledge users can exploit to make better decisions.  The main operational challenge in that portion of the analytics lifecycle stems from the large number of intermediate steps required to make data available for analysis, a phase that can take up as much as much as 80 percent of the time involved in the entire process.

“Traditionally, an analyst would go in and they’d write some code to clean up their data and then they would visualize the data to see if it looks good, going back and forth,” Joe Hellerstein, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley detailed in an interview on theCUBE at SiliconANGLE’s BigDataSV 2014 meet-up back in February.

Two years ago, Hellerstein, together with fellow computer science lecturer Jeffrey Heer and Stanford graduate Sean Kandel, founded Trifacta with the goal of eliminating the tremendous amount of manual overhead historically associated with whipping data into analysable shape. “We flipped the paradigm, we did  something called ‘predictive interaction,” Hellerstein, who currently serves as the CEO of the newly funded startup, said.

“We start the user with a visual representation of the data first, and then what the analyst will do is highlight features of the data that are interesting – it might be a string in a printout or a bar in bar chart – and based on those highlights we’ll predict what transformations they want to make. Then, very much like in Google Search, you can mouse over them and visually see how they will change the data,” he explained.

Trifacta’s success in removing the data transformation bottleneck  has landed it another $25 million in a third round of financing announced on Thursday. Early Cloudera and Splunk sponsor Ignition Partners led the funding, earning a board seat for managing director Frank Artale, while existing backers Greylock Partners and Accel Partners chipped in as well. The investment comes six month after the San Francisco-based company’s previous $12 million round and brings its total raised to just over $41 million.

Trifacta said that the new funding will be used to expand marketing and sales operations in a continuation of its efforts to drive customer adoption. The startup already lists Lockheed Martin and Accretive Health among its clients.

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