Shares of Tableau increased more than 15 percent in after-hours trading on Thursday after the Seattle-based data visualization company beat revenue expectations for its third quarter.
Tableau reported $170.8 million in revenue in the past three months, up 64 percent year-over-year. Analysts expected $158 million in revenue.
That’s also up from $150 million in revenue from the second quarter.
“I am very pleased with Tableau’s performance this quarter,” Tableau CEO Christian Chabot said in a statement. “We continue to demonstrate solid business growth as more customers embrace the Tableau way of analytics with great enthusiasm and success.”
The company posted a net loss of $0.19 per share, which did not meet Wall Street’s expectations, but is clearly not worrying shareholders. Shares are actually down 19 percent over the past three months.
Tableau added 3,100 new customers this past quarter and now counts more than 35,000 clients worldwide. The company closed 296 transactions greater than $100,000 last quarter, and there were 12 customers that spent more than $1 million with Tableau during the past three months.
The company also added 367 new employees during Q3 — it brought on 271 new hires during the previous quarter — and now employs 2,830 people worldwide. On the earnings call, Tableau CFO Tom Walker said that “we continue to invest in a large opportunity.”
“We plan to build a billion dollar business over the next few years,” Walker said.
Chabot was asked on the earnings call about increasing “noise” in the data analytics industry from competitors like Amazon and Microsoft, but said he wasn’t worried.
“Many of those tools will be able to carve out some niche and be able to achieve some level of success with customers, but won’t fundamentally change the competition for business analytics platforms,” he said.
Chabot later added that “platform-tied competitive plays will have some success” but won’t become go-to choices for customers with mainstream data analysis needs.
“I believe that as much now as when I founded the company,” Chabot said.
It’s been a busy year for Tableau, which announced a huge lease for a new office building in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood earlier this year with room for as many as 1,300 employees and inked a lease for more space in Kirkland. The company opened a Shanghai office in August and a Vancouver, B.C. office last month.
Tableau also made its first acquisition ever in August, swooping up Infoactive, a 3-year-old startup based out of Montreal that turns data into infographics, and released its first standalone mobile app last month.
The company currently has 1,200 employees in the Seattle area, spread across six buildings in Fremont and one in Kirkland.
