This article was co-authored by General Partner Rashmi Gopinath and Principal Robert Kaplan.
Business Intelligence (BI), defined as software that can transform data into actionable insights to help drive business decisions, is one of the core technology lifelines of any company regardless of size, location, and industry. Traditional BI architectures are comprised of data warehouses, Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) tools, and visualization layers. Experienced data analysts use BI tools to search, query, and merge data to generate relevant insights needed to make key business decisions. While traditional BI tools are excellent for producing reports on historical data and provide insights into “what happened,” they have limited to no abilities to help deduce “why something happened” and “what can be done to fix it or improve it.” In today’s business world, where speed is the ultimate competitive advantage, you want to know what the future is trending to and how you can improve things rapidly. These pain points have led to the emergence of BI 3.0. This solution primarily combines traditional business intelligence, with predictive and prescriptive analytics, along with AI-driven automation to deliver speed, with underlying self-service capabilities that enable non-technical users to explore the data using the power of natural language processing.
At B Capital Group, we are particularly excited about two major advancements in the data analytics space. The first is the consumerization of enterprise software. BI tools should be simple enough to empower non-technical business users within the organization. Additionally, a next-gen enterprise BI platform should provide insights on the underlying data without the help of a technical team and let users explore data in the same fashion a consumer would expect to get answers using Google. The second is combining AI and automation with BI tools to help users understand what caused changes in the data and how to adapt to these changes using prescriptive analytics. These two components create a fundamental shift, democratizing access to data and changing BI from a “system of reporting” to a “system of actionable insights” by closing the loop between data and action.
This is why we are incredibly excited to announce our investment in Hypersonix — the leading BI 3.0 platform targeting revenue intelligence use cases. Hypersonix combines a Google-like search functionality with predictive and prescriptive analytics, arming business users with data and insights to make optimal decisions to drive revenue growth. Hypersonix was launched in 2018 by co-founders Prem Kiran, Rama Rao, and Gina Becchetti, who bring extensive experience in enterprise data analytics and AI. Hypersonix has seen exceptional growth over the last couple of years, quickly establishing itself as the premier BI 3.0 platform for companies across industries such as retail, e-commerce, CPG, financial services, and manufacturing.
Hypersonix offers a unified data and analytics AI platform to analyze and comprehend business data and provides insights, predictions, and recommendations to drive revenue growth. For instance, if an enterprise is trying to optimize prices on specific items, Hypersonix can look at data across past performance, inventory, correlation with other product sales and inventory levels, consumer behavior, and broader market data to quickly recommend a course of action. This type of pricing study traditionally would take an enterprise six months of specialized consulting projects or a myriad of point solutions that create tremendous complexities in addition to high costs and long cycles to generate appropriate recommendations.
In addition to AI-driven insights and recommendations, Hypersonix arms non-technical business users with the ability to quickly query the underlying data using natural language processing and provides a no-code/low-code environment to model, extend along with workflow automation. Users can analyze specific changes in business performance in a matter of minutes and make real-time business decisions that can drive significant revenue growth. Large enterprise customers such as Intel, Amazon, Taco Bell, KFC, Giant Eagle, and Marriott trust Hypersonix’s commerce intelligence platform to turn operational data into real-time intelligence to drive revenue and business growth.
While we believe Hypersonix is the market-leading platform, our decision to invest was equally driven by the quality of the team. Prem Kiran (CEO) spent 11 years at SAP leading the business analytics and applications team before founding CLYP (automated marketing intelligence) that was acquired by Fishbowl, and subsequently by STG. He brings a deep domain knowledge of the BI and Enterprise space and understands that ease of use needs to be combined with speed and prescriptive intelligence to create significant ROI for business users. Rama Rao (Chief Product and Data Officer) is uniquely suited to execute on this vision, having spent time as the Chief Data Officer at Intuit and Kabbage after stints leading analytics and data Science at eBay/ PayPal, and several years of teaching Data Science at MIT.
As global investors in enterprise software, we are thrilled to partner with Hypersonix in this journey to empower businesses to utilize and act on their data to improve operations, create better customer experiences, and leverage actionable business intelligence to win in an increasingly competitive environment.