business intelligence

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.

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

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in analytics, Apps, battery ventures, business intelligence, Coefficient, Enterprise, startup, StartupsNo Comments

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.”

Y42 wants to become mission control for your data pipelines • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in business intelligence, data integration, data pipelines, Enterprise, managed service, Startups, y42No Comments

When Berlin-based Y42 launched in 2020, its focus was mostly on orchestrating data pipelines for business intelligence. That mission has expanded quite a bit over the course of the last couple of years and today, Y42 announced the launch of what it calls its “Modern DataOps Cloud.” Built on top of data warehousing service Snowflake and Google’s BigQuery engine, Y42‘s new fully managed service aims to provide businesses with more of the tools to make their data stack easily accessible for more users while also providing additional collaboration tools and improved data governance services. “The use case for data has moved beyond ad hoc reporting to become the very lifeblood of a company. However, data pipelines built ad hoc are inherently brittle and inevitably break over time, leading to an overflow of fire-fighting requests and, ultimately, mistrust in business data. For organizations that rely on data to make mission-critical decisions, this can be fatal,” said Y42 founder and CEO Hung Dang. Image Credits: Y42 He argues that Y42’s new DataOps Cloud will allow organizations to more easily create and run production-ready pipelines and consume the data that comes through them. Like before, Y42 fully manages the data stack, using open source tools like Airbyte to integrate the different services and dbt Core for transformations. For advanced users and data teams, Y42 offers Git-based version control (though non-technical users can leverage this through the service’s web app, too) and with this new platform, the company also now offers enhanced governance tools like a data catalog, asset ownership assignments, data contracts and multi-level access controls. “Our vision is for every organization — whether it has one single data engineer, data analyst or a whole data team — to be able to create and run production-ready data pipelines efficiently and consume data in any downstream application to make better business decisions. The Y42 Modern DataOps Cloud makes this vision a reality — today,” said Dang. In addition to the new managed service, Y42 also today announced that it has brought on Jules Cantwell as its president. Before Y42, Cantwell was the COO of Qualtrics EMEA. “The tech industry is at a tipping point where the breadth and volume of data that companies are gathering is rapidly outpacing their ability to manage it effectively. The need for a Modern DataOps Cloud to manage data pipelines in a scalable manner has become mission-critical,” said Cantwell. “Y42 has the product vision, customer proof points and passionate team to truly transform the data management space.” The company also recently brought on Max Herrmann, the former CMO of data integration platform Cask (which Google acquired in 2018) and most recently the CMO at Swim.ai, as its senior VP of Marketing.