Cloud data integration pioneer Matillion Ltd. has secured another big funding round, raising $150 million in a late-stage financing led by General Atlantic that brings its total amount raised to $310 million and its valuation to $1.5 billion.

Today’s Series E round, its second triple-digit raise this year, also saw participation from Battery Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Matillion is a British firm that offers extract/transform/load services for multiple data sources. ETL refers to the three steps — extract, transform and load — that are used to prepare and blend data from multiple sources so it can be analyzed for business use.

For large enterprises, moving data to an analytics environment can be a challenge because the native format in which the data is stored isn’t necessarily supported by their analytics tool of choice. That means the information often has to be modified before it can be processed. The more data sources are required for an analytics project, the more work is involved in readying the information for analysis.

Matillion’s ETL service speeds up the task by providing pre-packaged connectors for importing information from business applications. The service works with popular databases, as well as software-as-a-service platforms such as Salesforce. For added measure, Matillion has a drag-and-drop tool that enables companies to build a custom connector if the system from which they wish to import data isn’t supported out of the box.

After extracting the necessary records, Matillion enables companies to load their information into popular cloud analytics platforms such as Snowflake, Amazon Redshift and Google Cloud’s BigQuery. The service is also capable of modifying the data before it’s transferred so as to ease processing. For example, if a company is building a sales analytics dashboard, its developers can use Matillion to filter duplicate customer and transaction logs before they’re incorporated into the dashboard.

Matillion says its ETL connectors make life easier because the average enterprise analyzes data from a staggering 1,080 different sources. The alternative to using Matillion, the company says, is to rely on developers to hand-code connections one by one for each data source.

Matillion Chief Executive Matthew Scullion said the company’s platform serves as a kind of “data operating system” that can transform operational data into “analytics-ready datasets” that fuel enterprise business intelligence, artificial intelligence and machine learning initiatives.

The startup says it has “hundreds” of large enterprise customers too, naming Sony Corp., FOX Corp., Western Union Co., Slack Technologies Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. among them.

The company is rivaled in the data transformation market by the likes of FiveTran Inc., which creates its own proprietary technology, and by Airbyte Inc., which is powered by open-source connectors.

Chris Caulkin, managing director and head of technology for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at General Atlantic, said the market for cloud data integration and transformation is expanding rapidly.

“We believe that Matillion’s low-code ETL platform simplifies the process of constructing data pipelines and preparing data for analysis, enabling citizen data scientists and data engineers alike to play a valuable role in extracting data-based insights,” he said.

Image: Matillion