We just raised our $16M Series B funding round at Tellius ($33M to date) and couldn’t be more excited!! 🎉 This post outlines how we got here and what’s next.
Tellius is a dark horse in the super crowded data & analytics industry. 🏇But we’ve been galloping forward these last few years, rapidly expanding and advancing our decision intelligence platform to enable data and business teams to drive new data analytics and AI use cases and to unlock the value in all of their data.
Here are a few achievements: a) continued land/expand in Fortune 500 customers; b) 3x customer and user growth; c) high Net Dollar Retention of 150%, indicating customer stickiness and expansion; d) several key hires (and hiring!); e) industry recognition as both Visionary in the Gartner® Magic QuadrantTM for Analytics & BI Platforms (2022) AND Representative Vendor in the Gartner® Market Guide for Multipersona Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms (2022); f) rapid product iteration; g) key integrations in the modern data stack (Snowflake, Looker, Databricks,+ more).
So, how did we get here?
The Crazy Ambitious Goal
Tellius has a crazy ambitious goal: empower everyone to make better and faster business decisions from data. Not just technical or analytics teams. Everyone. Ubiquitous analytics.
Self-service Analytics/BI firms from the 2000s tried — and largely failed — at this vision, evidenced by a lack of widespread tool adoption (~30% of workers use BI tools) and the fact that most orgs aren’t data-driven (just ~26.5% of firms claim to succeed) despite billions of dollars of investment in data and analytics initiatives.
What’s the solution? Drastically new approaches and technology to make analytics:
- Ridiculously easy/accessible;
- MUCH more intelligent/automated;
- Highly integrated/flexible (from a people, process, and tools perspective);
- Cloud scaleable (since data gravity has moved to the cloud);
That’s exactly what we’ve built at Tellius.
What, exactly, is Tellius?
Tellius delivers on the failed promise of self-service analytics by delivering the most trusted, comprehensive insights with:
- Ease-of-use: natural language capabilities and a modern user experience
- Intelligence: AI/ML-driven insights and automation
- Power & Flexibility: no code, low-code, and custom business logic/models
- Cloud-scale: dual analytics engine for fast queries + robust Spark-based ML jobs
…resulting in a modern analytics tool that any user can use to ask questions of their business data, analyze billions of records in seconds, and gain comprehensive data-driven insights and predictions in a single platform.
Fortune 500 companies — across industries — are augmenting human expertise and curiosity with intelligent automation. For example:
- A pharmaceutical firm uses Tellius to solve the “needle in a haystack” problem of identifying the right healthcare professionals (HCP) treating the right patient at the right phase of treatment to put life-saving drugs in the right hands via an ML-based HCP targeting model.
- A multinational CPG firm’s marketing team was drowning in a sea of dashboards and had difficulty cutting through the noise of all their data. Using Tellius, the firm is optimizing allocation of their audience-based marketing resources by combining hundreds of gigabytes of sales data with store traffic and demographic data, and automating the generation of insights that the marketing team didn’t previously have the time or skills to uncover. Tellius trend driver insights identify — in just minutes — the key demographic groups that drive brand performance.
- A Fortune 50 bank’s Credit Risk team was spending 1000s of hours pouring through 300+ variables of disconnected sources (e.g. FICO scores, credit line changes, assets, channels, etc.) in order to manage risk and personalize offers, which created bottlenecks as business users waited days to deliver answers. The team now uses Tellius to automatically parse through hundreds of variables to better understand the attributes of consumer risk and personalize customer offers, allowing for answers in minutes and $7.2M/y in savings by identifying higher-risk accounts that would have otherwise been missed.
The head of Customer Analytics at a major CPG firm describes before/after Tellius:
“Before Tellius, we very much operated in a ‘throw it over the wall’ fashion: business users threw analytics requests to the analytics team; analytics teams threw advanced work to backlogged data science teams. Tool switching, stuff lost in translation, and it all took too long and we were missing critical opportunities. With Tellius, everyone is on the same page and we’re identifying insights at the speed of business!”.
Where do we go from here?
Series B is the start of an exciting ‘Act Two’ for Tellius, as we double down on:
- Consumer-grade Ease of Use. Analytics ubiquity means empowering any user to explore and derive insights from their data in the most natural way possible; consume data in the most compelling way, and ask industry-specific questions. To accomplish this, we are doubling down on contextual search and insights innovations; automated storytelling using NLG; and industry-specific insights and smart, out-of-the-box calculations (e.g., market share analysis, year-over-year analysis, etc.).
- Cloud. Tellius was built for cloud scale data from the start. We will continue to further our zero-data movement query and insights pushdown to leading clouds (e.g. Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, BigQuery, etc.) as well as support hybrid and multicloud environments in order to run analysis at cloud-scale across terabytes of data at speed.
- Data Ecosystem Integration. Tellius is the modern analytics interface to the cloud. We have existing partnerships with the leading cloud storage providers including Snowflake, Databricks, Looker, and leading cloud datawarehouses. Moving forward we look forward to building relationships with dbt, data cataloging tools, as well as deepening relationships with existing systems integrators and new partnerships.
- Open/Flexible. Openness, flexibility, and power are critical to the adoption of decision intelligence. We will continue to build on our explainability capabilities (e.g. users can inspect row-level explanations of ML models; and can expose the SQL statement generated from our natural language search). We also will continue to invest in flexibility in terms of no/low code (e.g. SQL/Python for custom business logic when necessary).
- Industry solutions. Ubiquitous means fitting into the worlds of our users, and we will be doubling down efforts to document and operationalize more industry-specific use cases such as sales effectiveness, marketing analytics, supply chain analytics, and industry-focused solutions.
Conclusion
We’re on an exciting mission towards a world where decisions are made better and faster through AI-powered Decision Intelligence. We invite you to join us on this journey by learning more about how AI-powered Decision Intelligence can augment your firm’s analytics capabilities or scheduling a demo to learn more.
Before signing off – at this milestone, I just wanted to say a huge thank you to our customers and our people. For the inspiring passion, drive and commitment to Tellius and our values – thank you, Tellians.
It’s just the beginning, and we can’t wait to invite others on our journey!
Onwards and upwards! 🚀🚀🚀
Written by: Ajay Khanna,
Founder and CEO at Tellius
