ThoughtSpot - Making Data Analytics as Simple as a Google Search
ThoughtSpot is a making data analysis as easy as a simple google search, it is also one of the highest traded companies in the secondary market in the month of May, continue reading for full analysis.
Editor’s Note: Thank you to 43 new people who decided to subscribe to our newsletter. Term Sheet Digest is a weekly newsletter for the Attack Capital community. If you are in the mood to read about private company stocks that are heating up in the secondary market and the biggest news around Silicon Valley, you are in the right place.
This Week’s Top Pick in the Secondary Markets
Thoughtspot makes data analysis as easy as using google for search. It is a search & AI driven analytics platform that allows you to get granular insights from billions of rows of data. With an AI powered search that learns from your usage.
ThoughSpot is co-founded by Ajeet Singh, who previously founded Nutanix, a cloud computing company that sells software, cloud services (such as desktops as a service, disaster recovery as a service, and cloud monitoring), and software-defined storage. Nutanix is currently public and it is valued at around $6.9 Billion.
ThoughtSpot is valued at $4.2Bn and has raised around $644 Million, the company is backed by some of the biggest VC firms in the valley - Snowflake Ventures, Lightspeed, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Fidelity, Capital One Ventures.
The Beginning
The germ of an idea for what would become ThoughtSpot came to Singh when he noticed that people's ability to store data was really improving. Companies such as Aster and Hadoop (an open-source collection of software that uses networks of computers to process very large volumes of data) were starting to gain traction in the late-2000s.
On the other hand, how that data was delivered to the end users, who were often business users and not software professionals, was still very manual. One would need analysts and data experts to build dashboards, and “people had to wait weeks to get those answers,” according to Singh.
The problem is simple, earlier, people in business functions used to ask developers to collect data regarding their business function and create dashboards, which used to take around a week - delaying the decision-making process. Through the ThoughSpot platform, the power to analyze business data remains with business function leaders.
The Platform
Singh decided to make this process of retrieving and processing data as simple as using Google; people can go to a search bar and ask the question they have and get an instant answer, make a business decision, and move on.
The ThoughtSpot platform not only lets you search for the data and query that you are looking for, but it also auto-analyzes billions of rows of data and provides granular insights. Worried about presenting the insights in a digestible format, ThoughtSpot’s platform already does this for you, and the best part is you can access all this from your phone.
The second layer of ThoughtSpot’s platform helps users connect the product to their cloud data platform and start live-querying data in minutes; users can also easily scale up and down to meet the demand of their businesses. The company also lets users create governed, reusable, and logical data models that empower everyone in your organization to create insights with AI-Powered Analytics intuitively.
Employees can easily push cloud data to their favorite business apps so frontline teams can view data in context, apply insights to business use cases, improve processes, and make smarter business decisions, without compromising on the security of their data; the platform delivers industry-leading cloud security and governance controls right out of the box.
Secondary Market Performance
ThoughSpot is currently trading at around $12/share in the secondary marketplaces, down from its peak of $25 just after its Series F financing of $100 Million. Currently, The Private Shares fund, in its SEC report, has marked its ThoughSpot investment at $1,998,533 fair value for 162,087 shares bringing its per-share price to $12.33. ThoughtSpot was also one of the highest traded stocks in the secondary marketplace Hiive in the month of May.
The company has crossed the $100 Million revenue mark in both 2021 and 2022. The biggest tailwind for ThoughtSpot is AI. AI is going to bring unimaginable changes to almost all companies, but for ThoughtSpot, winning AI is much more important because the core product - AI-powered Analytics - is totally dependent on advancements in AI technology.
The New Era & Competition
It is not an overstatement to say that advancement in AI is beneficial for a company whose core product revolves around AI. ThoughtSpot recently launched new and updated features for its analytics suite with integration with GPT-3, including the private preview of its search tool featuring generative AI and a spate of integrations with data catalogs and productivity tools. The company was featured in CRN’s Big Data Top 100 Companies at number 20.
ThoughtSpot has competitors, of course, and some of those products are backed by technology’s biggest names—Power BI from Microsoft, Tableau, acquired by Salesforce, Looker, bought by Google, and Amazon QuickSight from AWS. Other independent providers include Qlik, Sisense, and Domo.
ThoughtSpot - to set itself miles ahead of its competitors- likes to bet big, its latest bet is its $150 Million investment in India is proof of it, the company will also open a new office in Thiruvananthapuram, and its third research and development (R&D) center in India. Its annual recurring revenues from its cloud offering have grown 102%, and downturn or not, according to Ajeet Singh, Co-Founder and Executive chairman of the company, this is no time to push the break pedals and slow down. Especially when your competitors like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Salesforce are exposed and recalibrating their decisions - there may not be a better time to strike than now.
Top Stories
SVB UK, which was acquired by HSBC in an emergency sale for just £1 in March, is now getting a rebrand and expansion under its new owner. Today the banking giant launched HSBC Innovation Banking, a new unit focusing on banking services to the startup, investor, and wider tech community.
In an AMA hosted today by Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman, aka u/spez, on the internet forum site, the exec doubled down on accusations against the developer behind the well-liked third-party app Apollo, which the company had previously accused of operating inefficiently and not being a good “API” user.
US VC giant Andreessen Horowitz — which has about $35 billion in assets under management — is to open its first (yes, the first) international office in London, led by one of the firm’s general partners, Sriram Krishnan. The office will focus on supporting the development of crypto, blockchain technologies, and associated web3 startups. a16z has committed $7.6 billion to crypto startups globally.
“Thought Leadership”
Marc Andreessen wrote a scathing piece on Why AI will save the world
Please share this newsletter with your friends, family, and colleagues if you feel that it’ll add value to their lives - probably the best compliment we can get :)