ThoughtSpot Raises $248M

The analytics industry is in the midst of a massive generational shift. The last comparable shift started in 1997, when Tableau was born as a Stanford PhD project by one of its founders. The data visualization technology pioneered by Tableau and Qlik was nothing short of revolutionary. Twenty one years later, in 2019, the productivity gains provided by data visualization has hit a plateau, while the technology itself has been commoditized by the likes of PowerBI. As innovations like cloud, mobile, and IoT make the world more software-driven, every industry is being transformed, and enterprises are demanding more. It's time analytics software evolved to meet the needs of modern businesses, who can no longer depend on weekly dashboards to compete in a digital world.

To help enterprises compete in this new world, ThoughtSpot today announced it has closed $248M in funding at a valuation of $1.95B in an oversubscribed round, bringing the company's total funding to $554M. New investor Silver Lake Waterman, Silver Lake's late-stage growth capital fund, joined existing backers Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, and Geodesic Capital in this round of funding.

With the new funding, ThoughtSpot will continue to invest in its go-to-market teams in North America, EMEA, and APAC to meet growing demand, expand R&D efforts, including hiring for its engineering and product teams, and invest in customer and thought leadership events, like the company's annual customer conference Beyond 2019. Passionate builders are encouraged to check out and apply for open positions at the company.

"When I see the work our customers like Walmart, BT, and Daimler are doing with ThoughtSpot to transform their critical functions like supply chain or customer service, I'm incredibly inspired, but I also realize how much unlocked potential remains when it comes to data-driven insights," said Sudheesh Nair, CEO, ThoughtSpot. "The world is changing fast, and businesses that change faster will thrive. As technology partners to our customers, we have only one job: provide the agility that's like oxygen to these organizations so they can compete and win."

"Seven years ago, we started ThoughtSpot to help create a more fact-driven world, whether in the boardroom or on the front lines of enterprises, by making data and insights available instantly to everyone, regardless of their technical skills," said Ajeet Singh, Executive Chairman & Cofounder, ThoughtSpot. "We've been fortunate enough to have some of the most visionary customers supporting our mission since our inception. While today's announcement is certainly a major milestone, 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."

Charting the Future with AI-Driven Analytics

As technology redefines every industry, enterprises know they need to arm decision makers throughout their organizations with smarter insights in order to compete and grow their businesses in the digital era. This has made analytics one of the hottest areas in technology. Despite this investment, many enterprises have failed to digitally transform, shackled by tools predicated on data visualization. These tools have been too complex for anyone but the most sophisticated data professional to use. For even these technical professionals, existing data visualization technology couldn't handle the massive – and growing – data volumes characterizing our modern world.

ThoughtSpot was built from the ground up to break this bottleneck, allowing enterprises to truly reap the benefits of their cloud, IoT, and big data efforts by turning data into insights at scale. Anyone who can use Google can find insights using a simple search to make data-driven decisions in seconds. The system takes this further by using AI and machine learning to automatically find and deliver insights to users they didn't even know to look for. All of this happens in seconds, across billions of rows of data, with ThoughtSpot's in-memory calculation engine. As a result, enterprises achieve the agility they need to delight their customers, identify new revenue opportunities, and drive the bottom line.

"The retail landscape is evolving at a dizzying pace. The only way to keep up is to leverage our data in new, innovative ways to improve our operations, delight customers, and transform our business," said Pravin Rangachari, VP of Planning, at Haggar Clothing Co. "ThoughtSpot gives us granular levels of insight into our merchandising data to help manage online and store inventory at a speed and scale to match the demand of the modern day retail shopper. I'm excited to see how their Search & AI capabilities will accelerate with the new funding to bring even more value to enterprises like ours."

A Record Breaking Year

The funding comes on the heels of a year of record growth for ThoughtSpot across all facets of the company, which includes

Growth Among Global Enterprises: More than half of the Fortune 10 and companies like Walmart, Hulu, Daimler, 7Eleven, PetCo, and Rolls Royce have become ThoughtSpot customers. The company also has an average sale price of $250k, contributing to sales growing 195% in the first half of the fiscal year as the company approaches $100M run-rate.

Expanding the Global Footprint: Since it's Series D funding, ThoughtSpot has opened new offices in Singapore, Tokyo, Dusseldorf, and invested $25M in it's office in Bangalore, India.

Attracting the Right Talent: in the last year, ThoughtSpot has grown employee count by more than 65% to nearly 500 employees. This includes several new executive hires, such as CEO Sudheesh Nair, Chief Data Strategy Officer Cindi Howson, SVP of Products Raja Mukhopadhyay, SVP of World Wide Sales Brian McCarthy, SVP of Business Operations David Freeman, VP of Public Sector Monica McEwen, VP of People Operations Marta Molina Paul, VP of Channels & Alliances Toni Adams, and VP of EMEA operations Spencer Tuttle

Building the Analytics Ecosystem: ThoughtSpot has announced partnerships with innovative companies like Google Cloud Platform, Snowflake, Dell, DataRobot, Alteryx, and Carahsoft to help customers tackle challenges across the data pipeline.

Recognition as a Market Leader: ThoughtSpot was named the first new leader in six years in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics & BI Platforms, a technology pioneer by the World Economic Forum, one of the 100 most important cloud companies by Forbes, and one of the 50 best cloud companies to work for by Glassdoor and Bessemer Ventures.

About ThoughtSpot

The world's most innovative enterprises use ThoughtSpot to empower every person in their organization, from C-suite executive to front-line employee, with the ability to quickly uncover data-driven insights. With ThoughtSpot, business people can type a simple Google-like search to instantly analyze billions of rows of data, and leverage artificial intelligence to get trusted, relevant insights pushed to them as answers to thousands of questions they might not have thought to ask. ThoughtSpot is simple enough for any business person to use, yet powerful enough to handle even the largest, most complex enterprise data without sacrificing speed, security, or governance. That's why customers like Walmart, 7-11, BT, Celebrity Cruises, Daimler, De Beers, Hulu, Miami Children's Health System, Nationwide Building Society, and Scotiabank have turned to ThoughtSpot to transform their decision-making cultures. By making insights a part of every conversation and every decision, ThoughtSpot is reimagining the role of data in creating a more fact-driven world. For more information, please visit www.thoughtspot.com.

About Lightspeed Venture Partners

Lightspeed Venture Partners is a venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the Enterprise and Consumer sectors. Over the past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped build more than 350 companies globally, including Snap, The Honest Company, GrubHub, Nest, Nutanix, AppDynamics, and MuleSoft. The firm currently manages over $9 billion of committed capital and invests in the U.S. and internationally, with investment professionals and advisors in Silicon Valley, Israel, India and China. www.lsvp.com