Too often over the last decade, line of business people have been forgotten when it comes to analytics. Even though these folks are the closest to what’s happening with customers, they tend to get left behind when it comes to tools, which are often geared for data scientists or at least people with a deep understanding of data.
Savant Labs is looking to bring analytics to line of business personnel and today the startup announced a healthy $11 million seed investment.
Chitrang Shah, founder and CEO at Savant Labs, says people charged with dealing with data spend too much time doing manual tasks to wrangle the data they need, and they do this repeatedly. He saw an area that was ripe for automation, which he sees as a key differentiator for the startup.
“So we are building a platform for [business users], and the main impetus behind it is the amount of manual work that goes on in doing analytics and reporting is staggering. You go and talk to these people and they will tell you that half their time, more than half their time sometimes, is spent just doing manual stuff over and over again. And that’s where we are out there to change. We are the first platform that brings automation to analytics,” Shah told TechCrunch.
If you feel like you’ve heard this before, Shah insists that his company is solving a problem for a group who are too often ignored by the tools vendors.
“There isn’t anything done for people who sit in the business functions and are doing the analytics…The analytics market is huge. It’s fragmented. There are a lot of different players — BI players, data analyst players — they are all building for either data engineering teams or for central analytics. Nobody is actually solving the problem for people that are sitting in the business functions,” Shah explained.
He launched the company in September 2021 as the economy was getting shaky, but he isn’t worried about the short-term macroeconomic environment. Shah says that he’s in it for the long haul and he can weather some turbulence to build a company.
He also believes his solution is relevant in good times or bad because automation is always going to sell. The product itself is a typical no-code workflow builder with built-in connectors users can drag and drop to connect to data sources, make certain actions and events happen and finally output the data to update sources like Salesforce and Snowflake, update the related dashboard and send a message to relevant employees on Slack when new data is available.
He has 20 employees so far, and he says as a startup founder, regardless of the tech company layoffs, the challenge remains finding employees who not only have the right skill set, but are committed to doing what it takes to build a startup.
He says that when it comes to hiring, he is trying to build a diverse workforce, but there are many challenges for an early-stage technical startup. But he says one advantage he has is being fully remote and being able to hire from anywhere.
“We were born digital native, so we don’t have an office. We were a globally distributed company from day one. So we have that level of diversity,” he said. But he says that so far gender diversity has eluded him because the hiring market remains tight for engineers in spite of the layoffs we have seen.
Today’s $11 million seed was led Cota Capital with participation from WestWave Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Uncorrelated Ventures, Handshake Ventures and several industry angels.
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