Advancing Analytics secures funding led by Databricks Ventures and Tercera
This article covers Advancing Analytics, a London-headquartered data consultancy startup, securing a growth funding round led by Databricks Ventures with participation from Tercera and follow-on support from Lead Edge Capital. The funding will be used to expand the startup’s Databricks-focused engineering and go-to-market activity and to scale its LakeForge accelerators for production data and AI systems, supporting customers in regulated sectors such as financial services, insurance and consumer goods.
Advancing Analytics has secured a growth funding round led by Databricks Ventures, with participation from Tercera and follow-on support from Lead Edge Capital — a move that deepens a technical and commercial partnership with Databricks and makes Advancing Analytics the first UK-headquartered consulting firm to receive backing from Databricks’ strategic investment arm. The funding will be used to expand the company’s Databricks-focused engineering, go-to-market activity and its LakeForge accelerators for production data and AI systems.
Why it matters
The deal highlights how platform vendors are starting to place strategic bets on specialist partners that can help customers move from proof of concept to production at scale. Organisations across financial services, insurance and consumer sectors are migrating away from legacy data warehouses toward unified lakehouse platforms to support advanced analytics and generative AI. For customers, stronger alignment between a platform provider and a service partner can shorten delivery timelines and reduce the operational risk of running production AI.
Inside the product
Advancing Analytics is a London-headquartered data consultancy founded in 2018 that focuses on designing, modernising and operating enterprise data and AI platforms built on Databricks. It holds Gold status on the Databricks Brickbuilder Partner Network and claims six Brickbuilder specialisations, positioning it among a small number of consultancies with that designation.
Its product and IP set centres on LakeForge, a regulatory and engineering framework that the company says accelerates engineering speeds by 12x, and LakeForge Agents, which aim to productionise data pipelines and agentic workflows. The firm says it will deepen engineering work across Databricks products including Genie, Databricks’ AI coworker, Lakebase (a Postgres engine for AI apps), Unity Catalog and broader lakehouse capabilities.
Clients named in the announcement include Aon, Unilever, Hiscox, Sega, WPP, ASOS, Hershey’s, FIS and the UK Government — examples of regulated and large consumer organisations where governed, production-ready data platforms are often required.
Who are the investors?
The round is led by Databricks Ventures, the strategic investment arm of Databricks, with participation from Tercera and additional backing from Lead Edge Capital, which previously made a strategic investment in Advancing Analytics. Tercera describes itself as an investment and advisory firm focused on AI-native and growth-stage IT services. Lead Edge Capital is a global growth equity firm with around ÂŁ6.6bn in assets under management and a portfolio that includes software and internet companies such as Asana, Grafana and Wise; its network is intended to provide customers, partners and talent access to portfolio companies.
The rationale from Databricks is straightforward: partners that can operationalise lakehouse architectures and agentic AI are valuable to customers attempting large-scale migrations. In the announcement, Kori O’Brien, SVP of Partnerships at Databricks, said:
Advancing Analytics has built a reputation for turning ambitious data and AI strategies into systems that deliver value for clients. Deepening our investment in this partnership means more customers can move from data complexity to real data intelligence, faster, and with confidence.
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Founder perspective
In the announcement, Terry McCann, CEO of Advancing Analytics, said:
Databricks Ventures’ investment is a significant vote of confidence in the platform, the frameworks and the people we’ve spent years building. Combined with our recent investment from Lead Edge Capital, this gives us the resources to go even deeper on Databricks’ platform and to keep solving the hard, unglamorous problems that stand between our clients and real AI outcomes.
McCann framed the investment as both validation of the company’s product and a way to scale delivery capability, talent and international expansion; the firm has offices in the UK and Portugal and works across regulated industries where production governance is important.
The bigger picture
The announcement arrives as demand for production-ready AI and data platforms is rising. Databricks’ own State of Data + AI report — cited in the release — pointed to an 11x year-on-year increase in AI model deployments and said roughly 70% of companies are exploring generative AI use cases. That dynamic is creating a commercial opportunity for consultancies that can bridge platform capabilities and regulated enterprise requirements.
For the UK and wider European market, the investment signals growing appetite from platform vendors to place strategic bets on local partners capable of delivering at scale. As businesses accelerate cloud migrations and adopt generative AI, expect further deals that tie platform innovation to partner ecosystems and that prioritise operational resilience alongside speed of feature delivery.
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