The power of business intelligence (or BI) has long been limited to a handful of employees within a company. It typically sits between two teams – analysts and IT – that play ping pong trying to deliver the best data for the business to solve any given problem or answer any given question.
The reason behind this history, i.e. why BI’s usage has been limited, is pretty simple: most BI solutions, even today are still quite convoluted and require complicated implementation. That means it’s hardly usable without proper training and requires an “analyst” or “IT” title to know how to use it properly. The net result of all of this, of course, is that businesses lose trillions of dollars because the right decision is not being made on time, or being made at all.
Tableau was the first company, starting in 2003, to really challenge this shortcoming for the first time with a visual analytics product for business users. (Sidenote: Salesforce acquired the company for nearly $16 billion in 2019.) Then came Thoughtspot and also Looker (acquired by Google for $2.6 billion earlier this year) over the past decade which both made progress in usability, but still didn’t solve the “BI problem” in full i.e. opening up enterprise data to anyone that needs insights, no training and no “analyst” or “IT” title required.
These are big reasons why I’m excited to unveil our funding in MachEye, which is coming out of stealth today. MachEye is a cloud-native solution that aims to completely democratize BI use in any organization. It has simplified it to the point where anyone can easily get insights from enterprise data via natural search, AI-powered models, and interactive audio-visuals (read: animations with audio narration coupled with charts and graphs) in less than half a second. As the founder and CEO Ramesh Panuganty puts it, “MachEye gives analytics a play button.” Or put another way, it enables business users to talk to the data and the data actually talks back.
I’m thrilled to be working with Ramesh on his newest venture. He’s a serial entrepreneur who launched three other companies prior to MachEye, including one acquired by Splunk in 2017. We were proud to be Ramesh’s first call when he made the decision to leave Splunk to go off on his own again. (The company was actually, in effect, incubated at Canaan!) If you know Ramesh, you’ll get why he was instantly able to recruit a stellar product team for MachEye, and after 2+ years of development, I already believe MachEye to be a best-in-class product, and perhaps, the only product in its class.
All of the early hard work has translated into incredible initial momentum with customers, including marquee names in retail, technology and education. With several large deals on the anvil, the company is at a clear inflection point and planning to double down on the momentum next year. Here’s wishing the MachEye team all the very best in this pioneering journey!