Zenlytic, a business intelligence tool for commerce, has raised $5.4 million in seed funding to continue developing the natural language interface for non-technical users who want to consolidate their customer acquisition, conversion, and retention software into one tool without data team is needed.
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 more and more love from venture capital firms as the category delivers more solutions for managing and analyzing large amounts of data, helping clients 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 does, but never actually delivered: true self-service capabilities.
Before starting the company, Janssen and co-founder Paul Blankley were data scientists who consulted with commercial brands about how to use data and found they had similar issues regardless of size.
“One of the biggest ironies is that they have a wealth of data to make decisions, but because their core product isn’t technology, they generally have smaller technical teams and they are late developing technical teams,” Janssen told. londonbusinessblog.com.
So they set out to develop their own take on business intelligence with Zenlytic, which he described as a true self-service tool designed specifically for commercial businesses. Users can combine all their SaaS customer acquisition, conversion, and retention 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 usually one-size-fits-all. Our technology unlocks better self-service by rolling up natural language capabilities, powered by GPT-3 and OpenAI, so it feels like you’re having a conversation with an internal data person.
The $5.4 million in new funding is split over two rounds, including one about two years ago and the other this year, led by Scott Friend, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures.
Friend told londonbusinessblog.com that commerce is one of the company’s main focuses and that he has spent most of his career in trade analytics. While looking for new software companies to help brands do things they couldn’t before, he found Zenlytic and saw that it was doing something that he’d seen needed but couldn’t find.
“We didn’t have nearly the genius of Ryan and Paul, but we thought there should be a self-service way for people to ask questions about their business data without hiring an analytics team,” said Friend. “We came across Zenlytic and when we saw versions of the product, we were stunned by their idea of being able to ask a question and let the machine do all the analysis. That is a dream for people who run brands.”
Meanwhile, Zenlytic is still in its early stages, so there wasn’t much to report on traction, Janssen said, and much of the funding will be spent expanding the company’s team as it becomes a product-driven venture.
He expects the company to triple its team of four over the next year as it adds more product and analytics people to develop additional capabilities.