Today, large organizations often use “business intelligence” (BI) tools to understand what's going on within their operations. This has created many lumbering leviathans in the software world.
Now, British startup Fluent has launched a $7.5 million investment led by Hoxton Ventures and Tiferes Ventures to apply AI-based large-scale language models (LLMs) to business databases and make research by the public much easier. We have completed a seed investment round of USD.
Essentially, BI tools connect to business databases and use SQL to create visualizations and build BI dashboards. This space involves giants like Tableau (owned by Salesforce), Power BI (owned by Microsoft), Looker (owned by Google), and QuickSight (owned by Amazon), just to name a few.
The market for solutions is huge. According to one report, the global business intelligence market will be valued at $27.11 billion in 2022, from $29.42 billion in 2023 to $54.27 billion by 2030. is predicted to grow. Gartner believes the market could grow even further as AI and LLM become more widely applied.
However, data teams spend a lot of time building these dashboards, especially in large organizations. And there's always the challenge of getting users to actually use them. It's a daunting task for data teams to groan at the thought of fulfilling requests that can take days to build.
Instead, Fluent wants to be a “conversation layer” over a natural language LLM on top of an enterprise's data warehouse. Convert these questions to SQL and generate answers much faster. So anyone can ask questions of data and gain insights in simple English, regardless of technical skills or business context, the company says.
Of course, this can significantly reduce response time. Robert Van Den Bergh, CEO of Fluent, told me: That means they ask more questions and use more data in their work. Data is now within their reach. ”
Fluent's customers already include Bain & Company.
He acknowledged that Fluent “primarily uses Azure OpenAI's GPT4 model,” but stressed that this is not a startup with an “OpenAI wrapper.”
He argued that that simplistic approach does not work to generate accurate SQL and therefore cannot generate correct answers to data questions in the context of BI tools. “Through 18 months of work, we have built a way for organizations like Bain & Company to deliver accurate answers that they can trust and leverage across their organizations.”
Ian Weber, partner at Bain & Company, said in a statement of support: “Fluent's platform has helped us leverage LLM to explore large, complex datasets and provide insights. Fluent has helped us solve questions that are too complex, especially for pre-built data dashboards. Consultants can get the answers they need quickly, efficiently, accurately, and to specific questions.”
Van Den Bergh said: “All business users want is an answer to a question. They don't want to do model work. They want to know how this client performed compared to this client. I think so. Or how [they are] Go here. And how did this marketing campaign perform? He said that while other players in the market are targeting data users, Fluent is targeting the business market, not data.
The realm of natural language queries has only recently become possible, so it's not a crowded market yet.
For example, Metabase is an open source analytics and business intelligence application that allows users to more easily create dashboards. The San Francisco-based company has raised $51 million to date.
Einblick is a US company that was recently acquired by Databricks (and is looking to go public) and is likely the closest player to Fluent in the market. However, Fluent maintains that Einblick's services tend toward more technical users within data teams.
Thoughtspot, which claims a $4 billion valuation, is also now implementing a natural language query system.