While many business employees today are expected to make decisions through careful data analysis, the tools needed to do so are clunky, slow, or sometimes absent.
This is according to Colin Zima, CEO of Omni, a Business Intelligence (BI) platform that aims to help organizations simplify how they work with their data. Before co-founding Omni, Zima led the search quality team at Google and was Looker's Chief Analytics Officer.
“In cloud data warehouses like Snowflake and BigQuery, legacy reliability combines with modern scalability,” Zima told TechCrunch. “Even so, tens of thousands of companies are tied to the outdated BI process. Modern organizations demand the agility of self-service analytics without compromising centralized control. That gap represents a massive market opportunity, which is why Omni was born.”
Omni's platform allows users to perform ad hoc data analytics, create charts and reports, and also provide tools to create visualizations using components such as hyperlinks, text, and images.
In addition to the point-and-click interface for creating Data queries and dashboards, Omni provides a compatibility layer for Excel spreadsheets and formulas. It also uses RAW SQL, the language used to communicate with the database, and automatically parses it and reconstructs it into a “modeled concept” that can be accessed through Omni's interface.
Products built with Omni, like dashboards, can be brought to other applications via integration, Zima added.
Building data products using OmniImage Credits: Omni
“We've built an omni to embrace the diversity of what you have to do with BI,” he said. “It's easy for everyone to quickly start exploring and dashboarding, but as your needs evolve, you'll have enough flexibility to handle deep customization and sophisticated data models.”
While there is no shortage of BI tools in the market today, Omni has been able to grow its customer base into over 200 companies, including Buzzfeed, Writer and Incide.io. Zima said annual recurring revenues will rise to almost $10 million, and he expects that number to triple this year.
Investors are eager to take part in the action, and omni has risen faster than “strictly necessary.” This month, the company closed its $69 million Series B round led by ICONIQ growth, and saw participation from Theory Ventures, First Round Capital, Redpoint Ventures, GV and Snowflake Ventures.
“We've seen other companies grow hundreds of millions of millions and burn out. [of dollars] We are trying to grow brute force,” Zima said. “That's not how we operate. Building everything we need with BI tools is expensive as it competes with all the major BI tools of the past 40 years. Our growth is efficient and intentional, allowing us to focus on research and development.”
Zima said the funding that raised San Francisco-based Omni total to $97 million at a $650 million valuation would allow Omni to maintain a “gas foot” around embedded analytics and spreadsheet features and “double-down” by hiring across the product and Market team. Omni currently has 85 employees and expects the year to end with 150.
“We want to be well funded and take control of our destiny,” Zima said. “when [exit] Derailing the mission of a company, slowing product development, customer experiences suffer, and magic fades […] Our strategy was to actively fund it, but to be thoughtful. This allows you to concentrate on your product without worrying about the runway. Our past successes have also placed us in a strong position to think about us in the long term. ”