ThoughtSpot, a business analytics company aiming to revolutionise the way organisations do business intelligence, announced $30 million in Series B funding yesterday. The funding round was led by Khosla Ventures with participation from existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partners.
ThoughtSpot’s aim is to make searching for enterprise data “Google easy.” Essentially, once the product is implemented, users can search within a structured database and find answers to specific problems, which can then be turned into custom dashboards.
“What we’re trying to do is make life for average people in the enterprise very easy when it comes to accessing data,” said Ajeet Singh, co-founder and CEO of ThoughtSpot.
“It’s a database we built from scratch,” Singh continued. “When we talk about ‘Google easy,’ it’s not just ease of use but also a need for speed. We have built a new kind of search engine that’s designed for numbers and for enterprises.”
Although ThoughtSpot is currently in beta and only available as an appliance, when the product goes live, the company will be competing with established names in the industry – including SAP, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. Moreover, companies like SAS, Birst, Pentaho, Qlikview, Tableau, and TIBCO’s Jaspersoft have gained considerable traction over the past few years and will be direct rivals for the startup.
Although the BI market is saturated and competition is fierce, Singh noted, “We don’t claim to be the only people to come up with this idea…It’s about execution.”
Given that more half of ThoughtSpot’s team are ex-Google employees, it could certainly be the case that execution will differentiate the company from the rest. The company also has the former head of search at Yahoo on board, along with the former lead for Oracle’s BI in the cloud effort.
ThoughtSpot has plans to open offices in New York, Washington and London by the end of this year. However, the recent investment will primarily be used on hiring additional engineers.
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