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Coefficient wants to bring live data into your existing spreadsheets • ZebethMedia

With the explosive adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps, the average company now has more than 100 SaaS apps to manage — leading to data being siloed across countless different systems. That makes analysis challenging. To wit, according to Forrester, between 60% and 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics. Ideally, analysts need something that connects disparate enterprise systems, like business intelligence and analytics tools. But these tools are often complex and unintuitive, leading employees to spend hours each day searching and gathering information. In search of an answer, Navneet Loiwal teamed up with Tommy Tsai, with whom he’d previously founded an e-commerce app, to build Coefficient, an app that brings live data into Google Sheets and other existing spreadsheet platforms. “Tsai and I had worked on consumer technologies for many years, and we saw a big opportunity to bring consumer-grade experiences to companies,” Loiwal told ZebethMedia in an email interview. Loiwal was previously a software developer at Google working on AdWords, while Tsai was an early engineer at location-sharing smartphone app Loopt. “Most data products are designed for the technical user, which results in a poor user experience and low adoption for business users. We wanted to bring the power of technical products to the business user with the simplicity that they expect in their consumer lives.” To this end, Coefficient — which today closed an $18 million Series A funding round — is designed to cut down on the number of manual and repetitive tasks business users have to complete daily to cross-reference data across systems. The platform lays on top of Google Sheets (with support for Excel forthcoming), bringing in data from customer relationship management (CRMs) systems, SQL databases and other SaaS tools. Using Coefficient, users can create, share and automate live reports, set up alerts and write data back to connected SaaS tools. A template gallery provides pre-made spreadsheet dashboards for common reports used by business operations teams (think team KPIs, leadership dashboards and decks and revenue analyses), which users can integrate with existing data systems to enable live data to power all charts within their spreadsheets. Coefficient’s spreadsheet add-on. Image Credits: Coefficient “Business users are more technical in the spreadsheet than anywhere else, yet business teams are often forced to resort to archaic methods of managing data — requesting frequent updates from technical teams with data expertise or exporting raw data from dashboards or CRMs to report repeat, manual analysis, reducing team efficiency and productivity,” Loiwal said. “Coefficient’s products extend the reach of advanced, connected data and analytics to business users, enabling the business to become more self-sufficient through real-time connectivity to the data in their source systems from where they’re working: in spreadsheets.” That’s a lot to promise. And to be sure, Coefficient isn’t the first to attempt this sort of thing. Startups like Airtable and Smartsheet already offer spreadsheet-like UIs to organize business data. Others have tried to put their own spins on the formula, like spreadsheets with apps and spreadsheets with granular access controls. Indeed, at first glance, Coefficient sounds a lot like Actiondesk, which similarly connects with databases, CRMs and SaaS tools to feed live data into Excel and Google Sheets spreadsheets. Like Coefficient, Actiondesk supports common formulas and offers templates for getting started. But to its credit, Coefficient got off to an auspicious start — Loiwal claims that Zendesk, Spotify, Foursquare, Contentful and Miro are among its customers. Combined, tens of thousands of people are currently using the platform. “We are seeing our customers grow their contracts with us despite undergoing layoffs — a testament to the value proposition of making business teams more efficient,” Loiwal said. “Additionally, with increased remote work and complex economic headwinds, companies need their employees to become more self-sufficient.” Loiwal says that the proceeds from the Series A will be put toward expanding Coefficient’s product offerings and “scaling global operations.” In the coming months, the startup plans to add new SaaS system integrations and expand the scope of its reporting automation tools. Battery Ventures led Coefficient’s Series A with participation from Foundation Capital and S28 Capital. To date, the company has raised $24.7 million in capital. Neeraj Agrawal, a general partner at Battery Ventures, added: “It is a testament to the Coefficient team’s product craftsmanship that users become evangelists, promoting use of the product throughout the organization … Coefficient products equip business users with the tools and automation needed to reach peak performance, a critical advantage amid an unpredictable macroeconomic environment.”

Analytics operating system Redbird makes data more accessible to non-technical users • ZebethMedia

Data engineers have a big problem. Almost every team in their business needs access to analytics and other information that can be gleaned from their data warehouses, but only a few have technical backgrounds. Redbird was created to help everyone in an organization create and run analytics without using code, therefore reducing the amount of bottlenecks that data engineers need to deal with. The New York-based startup announced today that it has raised $7.6 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by B Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Thomson Reuters Ventures, Alumni Ventures and Soma Capital, along with other funds and angel investors. Redbird, formerly known as Cube Analytics, serves as an analytics operating system by connecting all of an organization’s data sources into a no-code environment that non-technical users can use to perform analysis, reporting and other data science tasks. The new funding will be used to add more no-code capabilities. It also plans to build out its marketplace, where users and developers can exchange apps they create using Redbird. Founded by data analytics experts Erin Tavgac and Deren Tavgac, Redbird works with large enterprises in a wide array of verticals including consumer packaged goods, manufacturing, retail, media and agencies. Erin formerly worked at McKinsey, helping companies set up and run data analytics capabilities, while Deren was chief product officer at Saks Fifth Avenue. Erin told ZebethMedia that the two left their jobs to solve enterprise data analytics problems like lack of automation and advanced analytics that require coding skills. That means data engineering teams can’t meet all demand from stakeholders, leaving companies unable to manage the fragmented tools within a complex data stack. Redbird addresses these issues by enabling people without a technical background to create custom apps that automate analytics, breaking through bottlenecks for data engineering teams while giving everyone access to data analytics. Redbird’s peers in the enterprise data analytics space include basis analytic tools like Tableau, Looker and Microsoft Power BI, which Tavgac said Redbird does not consider direct competitors because they don’t automate complex workflows end-to-end, instead delivering generic data visualizations from datasets that have already been transformed. A closer rival are advanced automation platforms like Alteryx, but it has a couple drawbacks compared to Redbird. For one thing, it has less capabilities in collection, data science and visualization, which means customers can’t use it as a comprehensive analytics workflow solution, Tavgac said. It is also hard for non-technical users to adopt, a problem that Redbird was created to solve. Most of Redbird’s customers are large enterprises that make more than $1 billion in revenue. It is profitable, with seven-figure revenue and 9x revenue growth over the past year. Redbird monetizes through an enterprise SaaS model, with usage-based license fees. Some examples of how clients have used Redbird: a large media company created automation workflows that collect data from more than 10 sources, apply advanced analytics to them and generate thousands of custom reports to guide their ad sale activities. A global CPG brand is using Redbird to do digital brand health tracking across a wide variety of data sources, like social media, e-commerce review and Google search volume, and using advanced analytics to predict future sales trend. In a statement, B Capital general partners Karen Page said, “We believe Redbird will become a mission-critical platform for enterprises to manage complex data workflows. This investment underscores our strategy of working with innovative companies that enable rapid technological transformation across traditional industries.”

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