MachEye Inc. is hoping to democratize access to business intelligence after raising $4.6 million in a seed funding round led by Canaan Partners.

The company said today it has created an intuitive, artificial intelligence-powered BI tool anyone can use that features a Googlelike search interface. Through this, business users of all shapes can ask simple questions of their data in order to try to gain insights into their business.

What really sets it apart, though, is the AI capability. It helps people really dig into their data by automatically suggesting additional answers to questions that it believes the user should have asked, rather than what they actually did ask, to provide more helpful insights. Then, the answers it surfaces are delivered in an interactive audio-visual format that helps users to explore their data further.

The platform goes further yet by automatically generating what MachEye calls “hyperpersonalized insights” based on each user’s previous search history. In addition, it also analyzes the quality of the data it searches through, to ensure the insights it provides can be trusted by users.

MachEye said its platform is intended to eliminate the reliance that many companies have on internal data analysts to surface insights, by making it possible for any employee to dig into the company’s trove of information.

“Existing BI solutions have failed to truly empower users to easily explore the data they need for actionable insights and data-driven decisions,” said MachEye founder and Chief Executive Ramesh Panuganty. “These solutions are complex to use and have resulted in a paradigm of ‘what you ask is what you get.’ MachEye increases user adoption due to its ease of use, discovers insights in a completely click-less manner, and complements the natural search experience.”

Available as a software-as-a-service, MachEye’s platform automatically connects to popular cloud data sources such as Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Redshift database, Microsoft Corp.’s Synapse, Google LLC’s BigQuery and Snowflake Computing Inc.’s Cloud Data Platform. It can also pull data from traditional databases such as Oracle and SQL Server and takes just 30 minutes to get up and running, the company said.

Analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group said MachEye’s platform helps to remove many of the barriers to data consumption created by legacy services. “This allows a more direct approach to getting timely data intelligence, and every business user gets their own personal business companion,” he said.

Image: MachEye