BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Because Big Data Is Hot -- ThoughtSpot Raises $30M From Khosla

This article is more than 9 years old.

There is one sure fire way to raise a truckload of money from Venture Capitalists – deliver a compelling story that promises something related to big data. And this isn’t just hype fuelled funding – the promise that big data solutions hold to deliver actionable insights from the ever increasing amount of data organizations are awash in is an attractive funding proposition. The latest company to leverage good timing and market fit to raise a monster round is ThoughtSpot.

ThoughtSpot is a company that aims to reinvent Business Intelligence (BI) in the enterprise. Existing BI solutions are big, monolithic tools that tend to deliver very fine detail, but require a lot of work and tend to be slow to implement and run. ThoughtSpot Data Search Appliance is a plug-and-play solution that provides a search-based user experience for business data access and analysis. Based in Redwood City, the team that is building ThoughtSpot was also behind one of the stand out enterprise tech companies of the past few years, Nutanix. Founded by Nutanix co-founder Ajeet Singh and Amit Prakash, who was previously a founding engineer of Microsoft’s Bing team, ThoughtSpot has developed a relational search engine and in-memory database that promises to allow companies to search mass data quickly and easily.

The ThoughtSpot approach is to create an appliance, the ThoughtSpot Data Search Appliance, that uses regular off the shelf gear. Once configured, the appliance gives enterprises a natural-language interface for searching through corporate data. Much like Google ’s search product, the ThoughtSpot search engine predicts what users are looking for as they type.

This is something of the holy grail for BI. Existing solutions are powerful, but difficult to use and slow. Newer solutions tend to be quick and easy, but often lack the power of a broader solutions. ThoughtSpot positions itself as the “best of both worlds” vendor in this space.

And the investors are buying into that vision. Funded by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and a raft of angels, ThoughtSpot is now adding Khosla Ventures to the mix by way of a reportedly oversubscribed $30M series B round.Keith Rabois, previously COO at Square and now a partner at Khosla Ventures, will be joining the ThoughtSpot board.

Of course every woman and her dog want to be in this space. SAP has, for a number of years, been pushing its own in-memory analytics platform, HANA, as a way to deliver these sort of outcomes. Oracle also announced Oracle Database In-Memory just last week to deliver real-time business insights to its customers. The jury is out on whether BI is best delivered as a standalone product or embedded within an existing enterprise platform. ThoughtSpot (and its investors) are hoping that the former is the case.