London-based business intelligence startup Lightdash, officially known as Telescope Technology Ltd., said today it has raised $11 million in an early-stage funding round.

Today’s Series A round was led by Accel and saw participation from new investors Operator Partners and Shopify Ventures, plus existing backers that took part in the company’s seed round two years earlier, such as Y Combinator and a number of angels.

The company describes its platform as a kind of open-source rival to Google LLC’s Looker. It offers a command-line-based data transformation tool called dbt, which leverages Structured Query Language to help business workers transform raw information into structured datasets that are ready for analysis.

Previously, the startup called itself Hubble and it was more focused on running tests on companies’ data warehouse environments to identify data quality issues. It later realized that this capability was best paired with a BI tool, hence the decision to pivot and rebrand as Lightdash in 2021.

BI tools such as Lightdash are used by organizations to pool and integrate disparate data sets into a single analysis in order to unlock insights, identify trends and make predictions about the future. But whereas most BI platforms are designed to be used by those with SQL skills, Lightdash also caters to regular business workers with its visual editing tool. With it, regular business workers have a simple way to merge different datasets and discover insights for themselves.

With today’s funding round, Lightdash announced the launch of an artificial intelligence-powered assistant that’s designed to assist these regular workers. With it, they can ask questions about their data using their natural language to obtain curated insights relevant to the task they’re trying to perform.

For instance, finance teams can access an AI analyst that only has access to the data that’s relevant to their work, Lightdash founder and Chief Executive Hamzah Chaudhary, said in an interview with TechCrunch: “They can interact with their AI analyst in natural language, drastically shortening their time to insights, whether as a chart, spreadsheet, or a dashboard.”

With its AI tool, Lightdash is putting a lot of emphasis on data security, addressing the reality that many businesses are wary of letting generative AI models access their prized datasets. To satisfy security concerns, Lightdash’s AI analyst is governed by the same application programming interface used in the company’s standard BI product. So companies that already use its tools won’t take on any additional security risks.

In addition, the AI doesn’t need access to the actual data, but rather the metadata, Chaudhary said. “Customers have complete control over what information they want to share with the LLMs,” he added.

And regarding those LLMs, customers will have a choice of models to work with, including OpenAI’s GPT models, Anthropic PBC’s Claude and others. They can even use their own proprietary models if they have them, Chaudhary said.

With the new AI analyst, Chaudhary hopes to spark a new round of growth for Lightdash, which has already managed to increase its revenue by more than sevenfold in the last 12 months of an undisclosed base. Its customers include the enterprise resource planning software giant Workday Inc. and many other well known companies, Chaudhary said.

As for the money, this will be used to expand Lightdash’s team, which currently consists of just 13 employees spread between its offices in the U.S. and Europe. The funds will also help to accelerate the development of new product features, including yet more AI tools.

Photo: Lightdash