Of the hundreds of startups that sprang up in the wake of the data explosion to help organizations bring their vast troves of unstructured information under control, SiSense is among the most convincing. The company, which describes itself as the “Robin Hood” of the business intelligence market on its website, offers a complete analytics package for the enterprise touted as more practical than comparable solutions from the likes of SAP and Oracle.

SiSense has been reeling in customers and investors with equal ease since hitting the scene four years ago, recently catching its biggest fish yet in the form of DFJ Growth. The prominent late-stage venture capital fund, which had previously thrown its weight behind Twitter, Box and Yammer,  is listed as the lead investor in the firm’s newly announced $30 million financing round. Existing backers Battery Ventures, Genesis Partners and Opus Capital chipped in as well, bringing the startup’s total raised to $44 million.

The participation of DFJ Growth represents a major vote of confidence in SiSense’s value proposition. The company claims that its namesake platform handles workloads in the gigabyte and lower terabyte range far more cost-effectively than other technologies on the market while providing the same economies of scale for larger environments.

“We’re not going head-to-head against SAP HANA or Oracle,”  Bruno Aziza, SiSense’s former vice president of marketing, told SiliconANGLE. “Most of the people who can afford solutions like that have a lot of time, a lot of money and big teams.  And it turns out that’s probably 500 companies.” The firm says that its software makes analytics economically viable for a much broader range of organizations through the use of a homegrown columnar database that utilizes CPU cache, RAM or disk depending on which resource type is most appropriate for the specific task at hand.

According to SiSense, this unique approach allows for up to ten times better performance than pure in-memory solutions like HANA and orders-of-magnitude improvements over disk-based architectures. At the same time, the platform reduces hardware requirements to the point that “you don’t have to think about the infrastructure required to scale,” according to Aziza.

SiSense licenses its software, which is available both on-premise and in the cloud, based on a specified number of seats rather than usage to let customers take full advantage of this elasticity. “When you buy SiSense, the principle is that you can have an unlimited amount of data; we actually want you to add more data so we give you connectors out-of-the-box for free and as we add more connectors that comes with the product,” he said.

Besides making it easier for users to pull in information from outside sources, SiSense also automatically filters out errors and inconsistencies from incoming data and layers an interface over the top to let business users dig for insights without the help of an IT professional.

The company said that the capital from its latest round will be used grow its headcount, expand into new markets and bolster its customer base, which already numbers in the hundreds and includes high-profile brands like Target, eBay, ESPN, Samsung and Wix. Randy Glein, a managing director at lead investor DFJ Growth, is joining the board.

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