Self-serve business intelligence startup Zenlytic, officially known as Ex Quanta Inc., said today it has closed on a $9 million early-stage round of funding, to fuel its ambitions of bring artificial intelligence-powered BI to every office worker.

Today’s Series A round was led by M13, which was joined by new and old investors such as Bain Capital Ventures, Primary Ventures, Company Ventures, Correlation Ventures and 14 Peaks, plus a number of angel investors.

Zenlytic has created a business intelligence platform with a difference, centered on Zoë, an AI data analyst that it says is more advanced than traditional copilots or text-to-SQL tools. According to the startup, Zoë is an autonomous data agent that has the ability to answer complex, high-value questions, empowering anyone to obtain actionable insights grounded in their company’s data, even if they have zero coding knowledge.

The startup explains that Zoë is powered by a “cognitive layer” based on an automated data model that’s made accessible through a simple, text-based natural language interface. When a new customer first signs up to use Zoë, Zenlytic will set up its entire data stack so it can access all of the pertinent information relating to the organization’s business processes, customers, marketing operations, accounts – whatever source of data that might be able to provide useful insights to employees.

According to Zenlytic, Zoë is able to access information from sources such as Excel files, advertising platforms, customer relationship management systems and software-as-a-service applications.

Zenlytic co-founder and Chief Executive Ryan Janssen told SiliconANGLE that the problem with existing BI and analytics tools is that they’re built for people who understand how data works, which is not your average office worker.

“They require you to either use SQL or learn a complex user interface, and understand architectures for joining, pivoting, and aggregating data,” he explained. “Most of all, users need to deeply understand the specifics of the datasets they’re exploring. We believe that’s 11% of a company at best.”

Zenlytic’s approach is completely different, Janssen said, in that the company doesn’t provide users with any BI tools, but rather, a ready-made analyst. He said Zoë allows everyone to ask questions of their data in plain language and find the insights they’re looking for.

“So they don’t need to learn a new interface or write SQL,” he said. “They don’t even need to know where the data is or how it’s stored. They just ask questions.”

Although it sounds easy, Zenlytic’s claim to be the world’s first true self-service BI tool is quite a bold one, considering that there is an entire category of tools available that claim to offer the same kinds of capabilities. Janssen acknowledged this, but argues that true self-serve is about making BI accessible through conversations. He said the advantage of Zoë is that it enables users to talk about their data in a natural way, and insisted that this is superior to other BI tools that call themselves self-serve.

“This includes other BI chatbots, which struggle to get an LLM to write reliable SQL for even a single question,” he said. “Zoë is an autonomous agent that converses like a data analyst. We believe ‘self-serve’ is a spectrum and that many legacy BI platforms are taking some liberties with where they’re at.”

With the money from today’s funding round, Janssen said his company will now be able to “democratize” BI with a desperately needed analytics platform that “people can actually use.”

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