We spoke with some of the investors getting richer off Google Cloud's $2.6 billion acquisition of data-analytics company Looker (2024)

In total, since its founding in 2012, the startup had raised a little over $280 million from Kleiner Perkins, Meritech Capital Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, First Round Capital, Goldman Sachs, CapitalG (formerly Google Capital), and IVP, among others. Today, many of these investors are seeing a payday.

"I fell out of my chair when I saw the tech because it's just so hard to build," Tomasz Tunguz, a Redpoint Ventures partner and former Looker board member, told Business Insider.

"It was the dog days of August, and I was asking my network of friends in the startup ecosystem about it, and they all said it completely changed how they ran their business," Tunguz said.

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Redpoint Ventures led Looker's $16 million Series A in August 2013 with $15 million in funding. The round came with a pre-money valuation of $64 million. It's reasonable to assume that with such a hefty stake early on, Redpoint stands to make a tidy profit from its investment when the deal closes later this year.

Looker's founder Lloyd Tabb "and the Looker team have this mission of empowering people to use data at scale to improve their lives, and Google's mission is basically the same," Tunguz told Business Insider. "Looker built its data-collection model on Bitfury and Snowflake, so I'm excited to see the next-gen data stack come together now that they have access to Google's data set."

Redpoint also participated in Looker's $30 million Series B in 2015, which Meritech Capital Partners led. The round was tied to a pre-money valuation of $150 million, according to PitchBook.

"In the crowded analytics space, Looker stood out for its product architecture (in particular the metadata layer), its extreme level of customer passion (customers often described Looker as valuable as oxygen), and its strong and unique company culture," Rob Ward, a Meritech Capital partner, told Business Insider in an email. "Lloyd Tabb, Frank Bien, and the entire team have built a remarkable business — and there's plenty more to come."

First Round Capital was one of the earliest outside backers for Looker and led its $2 million seed round in April 2013. That first round valued the company pre-money at $14 million, a figure that increased by more than 400% by the company's Series A four months later.

"When Looker (at the time the company was actually called Llooker) was coming into our partner meeting to pitch us, I called their customer references — and I was blown away by just how much these early customers loved the product," Bill Trenchard, a First Round Capital partner, told Business Insider via email. "This handful of early customers was so receptive, they referred dozens of other potential customers to Looker. Their enthusiasm started a word-of-mouth virality that we rarely see with an enterprise product."

Looker will continue to operate out of its offices in Santa Cruz, California — a move that Tunguz is likely to appreciate. He pointed to Google's success in acquiring and running YouTube, which remained at its offices in San Bruno post-acquisition, as the ideal model for Looker moving forward.

"They don't need any advice from me; I was the one that was learning from them," Tunguz said.

Kleiner Perkins declined to comment, as its partner John Doerr sits on the board of Alphabet, Google's parent company.