Netezza, a startup that focuses on gleaning business intelligence from terascale data, is expected to disclose this week that it has secured $20 million in a second round of funding led by Battery Ventures. Charles River Ventures and Matrix Partners are also taking part.

Businesses collect data from IT systems, Web sites, partners, and customers at an accelerating rate. But business-intelligence systems aren't designed to handle such volumes of data, says Jit Saxena, Netezza's co-founder and CEO. "When you're dealing with terabytes of data, you need a fundamentally new architecture," he says. "We started with a clean sheet of paper and focused on the problem of terascale data."

Netezza is developing what it calls a "business-intelligence platform" that includes hardware, software, and data-storage technology for loading and querying large volumes of data. Business-intelligence tools from Business Objects, Cognos, and other vendors can access data managed by the Netezza system. It will be aimed at data-intensive industries such as telecommunications, retail, and financial services.

Netezza's product is in early testing with a number of undisclosed customers, says Saxena, who previously founded Applix, a customer data-analysis software vendor.