Alpine Data Labs, a San Francisco startup with a data analytics solution built on top of Apache Hadoop, has raised US$16m in Series B funding from a group of four venture capitalists, including Sierra Ventures and Mission Ventures.

Alpine says its product enables advanced analytics without the need to code. Its predictive analytics capability was one of the reasons UMC Capital, one of the four funders, came on board.

Frank Lee, VP at UMC, said, “Predictive Analytics is the single most important area of investment that can truly impact an enterprise's business performance regardless of industry, size or where in the world they do business.”

Joe Otto, Apline CEO, said the company's advantage was simple: giving analysts access to big data analytics without involving a team of experts. “We are built for the new world of data, a world that's more fluid and agile, and where every data analyst can participate in data science. Our solution takes advantage of the storage and compute power of distributed systems like Hadoop or databases like Greenplum – and it does so without putting a burden on IT departments, developers or data scientists.

“With our software, customers are up and running in hours and their analytical teams can run complex algorithms on top of large data systems without having to move data around, or code their way through MapReduce or Pig.”

Alpine already has a few high-profile customers up its sleeve, including A.T Kearney, Havas Media, Sony, Nike and Barclays.

Both Otto and Alpine chief product officer Steven Hillion are former employees of Greenplum, the Silicon Valley data analytics company bought by EMC in 2010 to become core of the storage giant's big data business. Greenpum has since been folded into Pivotal, a big data and platform-as-a-service startup EMC created in 2012.