Preql raises first financing led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Felicis

Preql, a no-code data transformation solution, announced that it has raised $7 million in seed funding, led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Felicis, and top founders in the analytics ecosystem including Taylor Brown from Fivetran, Keenan Rice from Looker, Tristan Handy from Dbt Labs, Eldad Fakash from Firebolt, and Benn Stancil from Mode. Preql’s platform allows business users to structure data for reporting without having to write SQL or rely on specialized data talent.

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Preql builds upon the innovation of tools like Snowflake and Fivetran, which have made aspects of the analytics workflow accessible to organizations without data engineering resources. The next evolutionary step in the modern data stack is to allow business users to manage their own logic for reporting – something that’s not possible today without advanced SQL and data transformation expertise.

Preql’s Co-Founders and Co-CEOs, Gabi Steele and Leah Weiss, met while leading data teams at WeWork and went on to found a successful data engineering and visualization consultancy. During their time at WeWork, they experienced a disconnect between business users who need data for decision making and the data teams who structure and prepare data for analysis. Business users have to pass along definitions to data modeling specialists, who maintain logic in code but lack sufficient business context. Even with exceptional data talent, the result of this handoff is often lack of trust in data, frustrated data teams, and costly data investments without a clear path to ROI.

Preql’s funding comes at a moment where companies of all sizes are now investing in data cloud data storage and ingestion tools. The cloud storage market is growing 22.3% each year. Despite these investments in modern infrastructure, few companies have the internal resources required to shape their data for analysis. “There’s a misconception that simply storing data will help your organization become data driven. Data storage is necessary, but the hard part is agreeing on what you want to measure, how you want to measure it, and then translating that business logic into code,” said Leah Weiss, Co-Founder. “Preql gives business users the ability to contextualize their data and customize definitions, but then abstracts away the complex work of data transformation.”

Preql’s technology sits on top of the data warehouse, predicts the data model required for your business, and then lets business users customize metric definitions. It compiles all of that logic and delivers reporting ready datasets back in your warehouse, something that previously took months of manual effort from highly skilled data teams. “We’ve seen first hand the pain business users and data teams experience while building out a central source of truth for reporting,” said Gabi Steele, Co-Founder. “We are deeply committed to delivering a design forward and intuitive solution that business users will love and understand, and that more mature data teams are grateful for because it saves them so much back and forth.”

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“We’re excited to partner with Preql to make data capabilities more accessible to organizations and verticals that are currently underserved,” said Amit Karp, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “We were really impressed with the unique insight the founders bring to this problem and the clarity of their vision.” Viviana Faga, General Partner at Felicis adds, “we couldn’t be more thrilled to partner with Gabi and Leah, who are on a mission to change the way data is transformed and accessed, better serving the needs of business users at every company.”