ThoughtSpot Inc. took a big step forward in its bid to shake up the data analytics market with the closing of an oversubscribed $145 million Series D funding round announced today.

The company has now raised $306 million in its bid to challenge incumbents such as Tableau Software Inc. and Qlik Inc. with a platform that uses artificial intelligence to simulate the work of data scientists, an innovation that the company says makes analytics processing as simple as using a search engine.

The funding is the second-largest for an AI-based venture this year, trailing only the $153 million raised by robotic process automation startup UiPath Inc. in March. ThoughtSpot’s round was led by existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Future Fund, General Catalyst Partners LLC and Khosla Ventures LLC. A new investor is Sapphire Ventures LLC, which is SAP SE’s venture arm.

ThoughtSpot said it now has enough funding to achieve escape velocity for an initial public offering. CEO Ajeet Singh (pictured), who previously co-founded Nutanix Inc., said the total Series D investment more than doubled the amount he initially sought. “As we saw interest, we thought we could make this the last private round,” before going public, he said, declining to forecast a timeframe.

Unicorn club

ThoughtSpot didn’t provide an estimate of its total valuation, but Singh said “we’re excited to join unicorn club,” referring to a moniker typically attached to companies with billion-dollar-plus valuations. The funds will be invested in the company’s platform as well as global sales expansion and its research and development centers in Palo Alto, Calif, Seattle, Dallas, and Bangalore, India.

ThoughtSpot uses an in-memory calculation engine to run thousands of queries on billions of rows of data to ferret out insights that it says a business user would find interesting but wouldn’t know to ask about. The machine learning-based engine analyzes queries from across the organization to surface these reports.

This feature, combined with a familiar search-like query metaphor, can free data professionals to focus on projects that are important to the business rather than fielding one-off report requests. The company says its technology cuts reporting backlogs by up to 90 percent.

Legacy BI tools, including the market-leading Tableau, were designed for use on the desktop and require extensive data analysis and preparation, Singh said. “We’ve built a product that’s truly self-service at an enterprise scale,” he said. “So can ask a question and get an answer instantly, compared to waiting three or four days for someone to build a dashboard for you.”

Reflecting its global ambitions, the company has adapted its user interface to support Japanese and German, with Spanish, French, Portuguese and Simplified Chinese support planned. The company was named a “visionary” in Gartner Inc.’s 2018 Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms, although competitors Tableau, Qlik and Microsoft Corp. were alone in occupying the coveted “leader” quadrant.

Big fish

In a crowded market, ThoughtSpot has managed to snag three of the top five U.S. companies as customers. Reference customers include brands such as Amway Corp., Bed Bath & Beyond Inc., Capital One Financial Corp., Celebrity Cruises Inc., Chevron Corp and ServiceNow Inc.

All of those companies already use BI tools, and ThoughtSpot’s strategy isn’t to displace them, Singh said. “Typically, we sit alongside other BI tools that customers already use for reporting,” he said. “They use ThoughtSpot for ad hoc questions that it would be unrealistic for their analytics teams to build.” The company sells its service on an unlimited-usage basis, charging instead of the volume of data being analyzed. “Our goal is to drive adoption and we don’t want to have a per-user tax,” Singh said.

The company said revenue grew by 180 percent  in the fourth quarter of 2016 and that more than 80 percent of first-time customers invest more than $100,000 in their first purchase, with several customers expanding to million dollar plus investments.

Image: ThoughtSpot