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Zenlytic develops commerce-specific, self-serve business intelligence tool • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in bain capital ventures, business intelligence, Commerce, Ryan Janssen, Startups, Venture, ZenlyticNo Comments

Zenlytic, a business intelligence tool for commerce, secured $5.4 million in seed funding to continue developing its natural-language interface for non-technical users who want to corral their customer acquisition, conversion and retention software into one tool without needing a data team. Bain Capital Ventures led the round and was joined by other investors, including Primary Venture Partners, Correlation Ventures, Company Ventures, Habitat Partners (Red Antler) and the Sequoia Scout Fund. As my colleague Kyle Wiggers wrote earlier this year, business intelligence is getting some love from venture capital firms as the category yields more solutions for managing and analyzing large amounts of data so customers can identify new revenue opportunities. However, Ryan Janssen, co-founder and CEO of Zenlytic, is out to turn business intelligence on its head by doing something he believes the industry says it’s doing but has never really delivered — true self-serve capabilities. Prior to starting the company, Janssen and co-founder Paul Blankley were data scientists consulting with commerce brands on how to use data and noticed that no matter the size, they had similar issues. “One of the biggest ironies is they have a wealth of data to make decisions, but because their core product is not tech, they generally have smaller tech teams, are late to develop tech teams,” Janssen told ZebethMedia. So they set out to build their own take on business intelligence with Zenlytic, what he described as a true self-service tool specifically designed for commerce companies. Users can unite all of their customer acquisition, conversion and retention SaaS tools into one cloud data warehouse and access customizable analytics. “Unreliable data is worse than no data at all,” Janssen added. “Brands need customer logic, but today’s tools are typically one-size-fits-all. Our tech unlocks better self-serve by rolling up natural language capabilities powered by GPT-3 and OpenAI to make it feel like you are having a conversation with an internal data person.” The $5.4 million in new funding is spread across two rounds, including one that happened about two years ago and the other one, led by Scott Friend, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, this year. Friend told ZebethMedia that commerce is one of the core focuses of the firm and he spent most of his career in commerce analytics. While looking for new software companies helping brands do things they couldn’t do before, he found Zenlytic and saw that it was doing something that he had recognized a need for, but could not find. “We didn’t have nearly the brilliance of Ryan and Paul, but did think there needed to be a self-serve way for people to ask questions about their business data without having to hire an analytic team,” Friend said. “We stumbled into Zenlytic and when we saw versions of the product, we were blown away by their idea of being able to ask a question and have the machine do all the analysis. That is a dream for people running brands.” Meanwhile, Zenlytic is very much still in its early stages, so there wasn’t much to report on traction, according to Janssen, and much of the funding will go into expanding the company’s team as it moves toward being a product-led business. He expects the company to triple its team of four people in the next year as it adds more product and analytics folks to develop additional capabilities.

Momento launches out of stealth with a serverless cache • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in bain capital ventures, Enterprise, momento, Serverless, Startups, The General PartnershipNo Comments

After working at NASA as a rover roboticist, Khawaja Shams underwent something of a career pivot, joining AWS to team up with engineer Daniela Miao on DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database service. Not content to stop there, Shams and Miao left AWS to co-found Momento, a Seattle-based startup that’s today emerging from stealth with a “serverless cache” optimized for cloud computing. What’s a serverless cache, you ask? Well, Shams describes it as an elastic, “highly available” cache that delivers commonly used data to apps and databases faster. He claims that Momento’s platform lets developers add a cache to their cloud stack with around five lines of code, accelerating databases that run in public clouds such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud. “Legacy caching providers offer a different model that requires customers to provision and pay for their peak capacity. These inelastic services are highly inefficient, expensive, require a lot of work to get right, and simply do not scale,” Shams told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Momento allows customers to provision a secure cache, capable of handling millions of transactions per second, with a single API call.” Shams makes the case that legacy caching services are complicated and inefficient, forcing engineering teams to waste time tinkering around with too many configurations. Moreover, he says, because they don’t automatically scale, they require engineers to provision for peak usage — leading to wasteful spending. By contrast, Momento handles load spikes while abstracting away configuration. The platform automatically optimizes, scales and manages caches, also securing caches with end-to-end encryption and audit log support. Image Credits: Momento “Cloud computing made it easier than ever for customers to rapidly provision resources. Unfortunately, during the growth-focused phases in the recent years, customers have ended up massively over-provisioning capacity and are struggling with large bills from their cloud providers,” Shams said. “Momento is helping customers optimize one of the top line items on their cloud bills.” To Shams’ point, cloud costs for some enterprises skyrocketed during the pandemic as digital transformation efforts accelerated. A 2022 survey from Anodot, an analytics platform, shows that nearly half of businesses (49%) are finding it difficult to get their cloud costs under control. According to a separate poll by Flexera, more than 50% of companies now spend over $2.4 million on the public cloud each year. Momento claims to have closed “multiple six-figure deals” with customers including CBS, NTT Docomo and smart home company Wyze Labs. The startup got an early vote of confidence from VCs including Bain Capital Ventures, which led Momento’s $15 million seed funding round that closed this week. The General Partnership participated alongside Flickr CEO Don MacAskill, former Mozilla CEO John Lilly and other angels. Shams says that the funding will be used to expand 25-employee Momento’s engineering team, build a “full-cycle” go-to-market team, grow the Momento platform and add support for additional public clouds. “Due to the recent economic downturn, organizations are actively seeking cost savings and efficiency. Caching tends to be among the top line items on their cloud bills, and Momento’s ability to save on their caching is appealing,” Shams said.