Domo, the SaaS business intelligence startup launched by Omniture founder Josh James, has raised $20 million in new funding from Institutional Venture Partners (IVP). This round brings total investment in Domo to $63 million. Previous investors include Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Ron Conway and David Lee of SV Angel, and Hummer Winblad.
As you may remember, Omniture is a web analytics SaaS company that went public and was subsequently bought by Adobe in 2009 for $1.8 billion. Last year, James debuted his next project, Domo, with $33 million in funding from Benchmark, and aimed to tackle the business intelligence space. Domo purchased a company called Corda, and started accepting customers on a selective basis to test out the platform.
James tells us in an interview that he believes existing business intelligence offerings are static and non-collaborative. He is seeking to put all of this in the cloud, but in a scalable and easy to use format so people can actually make sense of (and make money off of) massive amounts of business data. James is hesitant to reveal exact details on how the application works but says the SaaS is a “dramatic departure for existing business intelligence offerings.” The application is able to analyze business data and display it in a user-friendly and realtime format.
“We’re continuing to build out our company to attack and completely reform an old industry that doesn’t work, while creating a brand new way of doing business with our business management platform,” said James.
He also tells us that the company still has much of the $43 million in funding raised last year in the bank but decided to raise additional funding because the company wanted to be aggressive with acquisitions in the coming year. IVP apparently was outbid by Benchmark in the last round, and jumped at the opportunity to to work with James and fund Domo.
IVP actually backed Omniture back in the day, and as Todd Chaffee, General Partner at IVP explained to me, “our investment thesis can be summarized in two words-Josh James.” Chaffee says that James is in the category of the Marc Benioffs, Larry Ellisons and Michael Dells of the enterprise world. “When he showed us what he was doing, we were in. We were blown away by what he built. He’s crazy enough and passionate enough to have a bigger exit than Omniture.”
“Josh and the Domo team are at the forefront of a huge opportunity,” said said Benchmark’s Matt Cohler, who is also a Domo Board Member. “Domo has the team, the vision, the focus and the product to transform an entire market.”
James says that for the past 9 months, Domo has had a controlled release with a number of enterprise companies. “The hit rate has been high of people who want it pay for it,’ he says. And the product is aimed at large enterprises as opposed to small businesses.
“We’ve been testing the market through an early adopter program and the overwhelming response signals that we’ve tapped into a major pain point for CEOs and other executives. Today, we can’t install customers fast enough. We are scheduling customers weeks out and have a two-month waiting list for our beta product,” James said. The new funding will also be used towards sales and marketing efforts. The company plans to reveal more news in the next few months including names of large global customers and more details behind its products and strategy
The business analytics software market set to hit $33.9 billion in 2012, and is only expected to grow in the coming years. James is taking on the likes of giants like Oracle, Microsoft, and others, but clearly he has a proven track record of creating lasting and valuable companies. And investors agree.
Below is video of James talking at the Web 2.0 Summit last Fall and another one showing how the Fort Worth Police Department is using Domo:
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