As data access becomes increasingly tied to business success, it's important to make data available to all business users, regardless of their data wrangling skills. The founder of Seam, an early-stage startup, experienced first-hand the need to make data more accessible while at Okta, and launched his company to solve this problem specifically related to customer data. I have decided to do so.
On Tuesday, they announced a $5 million seed to make their vision a reality and announced that they would be making their product available to the public for the first time.
“We are building what we call an AI interface for customer information. And our real mission is to make it possible for anyone, so-called business user, regardless of technical ability, to use data and It's about giving people the opportunity to answer all their questions,” Nicholas Scavone, CEO and co-founder of the company, told TechCrunch.
The way they do it is through a generative AI prompt interface that allows people to ask questions about customer data and get answers without having to understand SQL queries. “Our solution to this is actually to build a kind of end-to-end system that provides a simple chat interface where you can talk to your data in natural language, especially for sales and marketing systems,” he said. Told.
The problem with current systems is that retrieving information from data warehouses (Seam is built on top of Snowflake) requires knowledge of SQL, which creates friction for most business users and makes data analysis difficult. That's what you need to talk about on the list. To get the information you need to do your job. Generative AI systems provide the ability to automatically convert plain language queries into SQL code and return answers. He says he and his co-founders recognized this feature as a business opportunity.
“Every time I see friction like this in a business process, I know there is an opportunity, and that the discovery just happens to be well-timed with this change in AI technology. , we can now use natural language to solve this problem,” he said.
They launched the company in March 2023 and spent a year building it. It took a long time to build because we were trying to simplify something very complex that the entire team at Okta struggled with. “I think it took this long because there was a huge amount of data infrastructure that we had to set up. We had to integrate with over 20 applications. Being able to create pipelines with one click “There was a need,” he said. And it's been a huge effort to try to automate something that previously required a lot of highly skilled people to build.
With this product combination, they are currently aiming to expand their market. “We're really starting to scale. Our platform is robust, production-grade, and we're working with some great companies. That's how I think about our future. ” he said.
The $5 million seed investment was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Colle Capital, F7 Ventures, Ritual Capital, and Umami Capital. The company has also received investment from a number of industry angels.