Announcing Lightspeed’s Series E investment in ThoughtSpot
Even in today’s data-centric world, it can take days or weeks on average for a manager to send a business query to a team of data analysts, who then perform analysis and send back answers. There are more than 1B knowledge workers compared to 1.5M data analysts able to use existing BI solutions.
This has created a huge bottleneck for decision-making. As consumers, we expect to be able to use Google, Uber, and Slack with the click of a few buttons and keystrokes. Similarly, companies today can expect to get answers to complex business questions within seconds using ThoughtSpot’s search & AI-driven analytics platform.
We are thrilled to lead ThoughtSpot’s $248M Series E announced today.
The team at ThoughtSpot feels like family. We first met and invested in Ajeet Singh when he co-founded and led product at Nutanix. That’s where he first demonstrated to the world an extraordinary ability to create fundamental products that change how businesses are run. Sudheesh Nair later joined Nutanix as its first President and built the global sales team from zero to over $1B in annual bookings. Fast forward to 2012, Ajeet partnered with Amit Prakash, former senior architect for Google’s AdSense Analytics platform, to start his second venture, ThoughtSpot. Lightspeed helped incubate the company and led the Series A seven years ago.
ThoughtSpot enables company stakeholders to ask and get answers to key business questions through search and data visualization in real-time, without heavy BI team support. Those questions are as diverse as a manager understanding sales across products and regions, to a CFO asking what collections most impact working capital. Beyond simple search, ThoughtSpot also uses AI and machine learning to learn from queries and automatically finds and delivers insights to users. More than half the Fortune 10 use ThoughtSpot, and customers include Walmart, Hulu, Daimler, 7Eleven, PetCo, and Rolls Royce.
In the last year, ThoughtSpot has become a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics & Business Intelligence, and grew 195% in the first half of the fiscal year as the company approaches $100M in run-rate. The company has also grown to roughly 500 employees, with key new execs, including CEO Sudheesh Nair from Nutanix, SVP of Global Sales Brian McCarthy from AppDynamics, and Chief Data Strategy Officer Cindi Howson from Gartner.
At Lightspeed, we continue to expand our investment platform and be active throughout the lifecycle of our companies. We’re excited for the next chapter with ThoughtSpot, and in Ajeet’s words, “we know we’re only 2% done in achieving our goals on behalf of our customers. We will not rest on our laurels and will continue to bring fundamental innovation to the market, because that is who we are.”
— Ravi Mhatre & Amy Wu
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