ThoughtSpot Raises $145 Million To Boost Adoption of Search and AI-Driven Analytics

Hundreds of Global Enterprises, Including 3 of The Fortune 5, Leverage Thoughtspot’s Next-Generation Analytics Platform to Digitally Transform Their Businesses

ThoughtSpot, the leader in search and AI-driven analytics for the enterprise, announced it has successfully closed $145 million in Series D funding. The funding was oversubscribed with strong participation from both existing as well as new investors. Existing investors Lightspeed Ventures, Future Fund, Khosla Ventures, and General Catalyst participated, alongside new participants Sapphire Ventures, and other global investors. Since its founding in 2012, ThoughtSpot has raised $306 million in total funding. With the new funding, ThoughtSpot will continue to innovate its next-generation analytics platform, accelerate global business growth, including expansion in EMEA and APAC, and grow its R&D centers in Palo Alto, Seattle, Dallas, and Bangalore.

The $203 billion data and analytics industry is at an inflection point. While the industry has historically catered to technical users in the enterprise, there’s been a simultaneous explosion of knowledge workers who require data and insights to do their job. Traditional data teams, often hindered by legacy solutions, are unable to meet this growing demand, let alone take on highly strategic data projects. ThoughtSpot has taken a radically different approach to solving this problem, putting the power of 1000 analysts into the hands of non-technical business people without requiring any special training. Businesspeople can use ThoughtSpot’s simple search-driven analytics to answer the questions they know to ask, while its AI-driven analytics engine, SpotIQ, automatically answers thousands of questions a businessperson would care about, but wouldn’t even know to ask. Data professionals, freed from generating innumerable reports and tweaking countless charts, can focus on the analytics initiatives critical to their organization’s long term success. Unlike other artificial intelligence solutions, SpotIQ is completely transparent, meaning no decisions or analyses are conducted in a black box, fostering trust and driving adoption by end users.

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“In the few short years since founding ThoughtSpot, we have disrupted the analytics market and seen global enterprises adopt our search and AI-driven analytics due to its simplicity for business people and enterprise-grade scale and governance for today’s CIOs and CDOs. We see a world where your analytics platform serves up insights to you before you can even articulate a question. With the new funding, we’ll continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible with self-service analytics for our customers, partners, and the industry at large,” said Ajeet Singh, founder and CEO, ThoughtSpot.

“The analytics market has evolved to the point where it has become a business imperative for employees at all levels, across all departments in an organization to have access to trusted insights to make data-driven decisions. As the next-generation analytics platform for global enterprises, ThoughtSpot is already meeting this critical need for the world’s largest companies, as these organizations seek to compete in today’s digital economy,” said Ravi Mhatre, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners.

“ThoughtSpot has changed the enterprise data analytics game by allowing companies to understand and interact with their data like never before through their search and AI-driven analytics platform. We are excited to partner with the ThoughtSpot team and bring our global network and expertise to the table to help ThoughtSpot to continue its global growth and expansion,” says Jai Das, managing director at Sapphire Ventures.

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Adoption by the World’s Largest Enterprises

With digital disruption impacting every industry, both established enterprises and newer market entrants have turned to ThoughtSpot to equip their entire business, from frontline worker to C-suite executive, with true self-service analytics. The company’s record breaking year and notable market accolades, including being named a Visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics & Business Intelligence, the #1 Best Big Data Company & CEO to Work for by Glassdoor, and a Top Company: Startup by LinkedIn, demonstrate global recognition for the company’s solution.

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Three of the Fortune 5, twelve of the Fortune 100, and many other innovative global brands such as Amway, Bed Bath & Beyond, Capital One, Celebrity Cruises, Chevron, Haggar Clothing Co., Miami Children’s Hospital, OpenTable, Sterling National Bank, and ServiceNow have selected ThoughtSpot for the company’s unique ability to empower any employee with self-service analytics. ThoughtSpot now counts one of the top five largest companies in technology, telecommunications, oil & gas, retail, and financial services amongst its customers, demonstrating widespread and cross-industry adoption of search & AI-driven analytics. ThoughtSpot grew revenue by 180 percent in the fourth quarter, as enterprises invested heavily in the company’s search & AI-driven analytics platform. In their first purchase, more than 80 percent of customers invested six-figures, with several customers expanding to million dollar plus investments.

“At BT, nothing is more important to us than making our customers successful. We’re constantly looking for new ways to innovate around the customer experience and improve our NPS. We are thrilled to be partnering with ThoughtSpot to deliver a new self-service analytics solution for our business customers. Now customers will be able to quickly and easily analyze their bills on BT.com using the power and simplicity of search-driven analytics,” said Chris Brook, Director of Customer Service Transformation, British Telecom.

“Seeking to understand the industry from our customers’ perspectives has helped De Beers become the world’s leading diamond company and our Pricing department needs to collect, generate and analyze data of ever-increasing size and complexity to achieve this. As traditional BI tools began to struggle with the weight and complexity of data, ThoughtSpot stood out for us when we sought new, innovative solutions that would reduce the need for extensive data manipulation or time-consuming report generation. ThoughtSpot enables us to explore our large data sets easily, quickly and flexibly, allowing us not only to uncover the insights that were hidden in our data but also to spend more time on value-creating analytics,” said David Heppenstall, Chief Information Officer, De Beers.

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Growing Around the Globe

As demand grows internationally for new ways to empower every employee with analytics, ThoughtSpot has rapidly expanded around the world. In the last year, ThoughtSpot opened new offices in Japan, as the company rapidly expands in APAC, as well as new offices in the Nordics & Baltics and Dach regions to support the burgeoning EMEA market. Furthermore, the company has adapted its search & AI-driven analytics to support Japanese and German localizations, with support for Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Simplified Chinese coming soon. With the new funding, ThoughtSpot will continue its global footprint and build language capabilities for various markets.

In 2017, the company opened two new R&D centers, while substantially bolstering its presence in Palo Alto, where the company is headquartered. ThoughtSpot has opened an office in Bangalore, India, to innovate business intelligence in the cloud; as part of this effort, the company invested $10M in the region. The second R&D center opened in Seattle to build artificial intelligence solutions, including the company’s recently released AI-driven analytics engine, SpotIQ. The third center opened in Dallas and will support enterprise expansion. The new funding will enable ThoughtSpot to continue to invest heavily in these engineering centers and fuel the company’s ability to disrupt the analytics market.

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