ThoughtSpot, close to $2b valuation, analyses IPO route

ThoughtSpot announced it has closed US$248m in funding at a valuation of USD 1.95b in an oversubscribed round, bringing the company’s total funding to USD 554m.

Growth-stage public investors have joined existing backers Lightspeed Ventures and Sapphire Ventures in this round of funding. 

The search and AI-driven analytics company ThoughtSpot had closed a USD 145 million Series D funding in May of 2018 - valuing the company at over USD 1 billion. Since then, ThoughtSpot has expanded its global footprint as it opened new offices in Singapore, Tokyo, Dusseldorf, and invested USD 25m in its office in Bangalore, India. 

The new USD 248m funding elevates ThoughtSpot to nearly USD 2b valuation. Is the company ripe for IPO or some tech giant buying it?  “Seven years ago while founding ThoughtSpot, I knew we had the right problem, market and idea to build a sustainable company that can last for the long haul. We’ve been building the company with that goal in mind, and an IPO fits into that trajectory,” said Ajeet Singh, executive chairman and co-founder, ThoughtSpot, exclusively to Computerworld.

Explaining why the company is ready for IPO, he said, “Many of our customers (large companies) - primarily in the Global 2000 today prefer their partners to be public companies because of the transparency and stability that come along with it. Becoming a public company would help us further penetrate these enterprise accounts.”

The growth among global enterprises has been a prime highlight for ThoughtSpot over the past twelve months. According to company statement, more than half of the Fortune 100 and companies like Walmart, Hulu, Daimler, 7Eleven, PetCo, and Rolls Royce are now ThoughtSpot customers. The company also has an average sale price of USD 250k, contributing to sales growing 195 percent in the first half of the fiscal year as it approaches USD 100m run-rate, driven by 100 percent software subscriptions and multi-cloud deployments.

Taking into account growth from USD 1b valuation in May last year to nearly USD 2b in Aug 28, 2019, what would be the short term goal? “It’s definitely been a year of extreme growth for us here at ThoughtSpot. In the short term, we’ll continue to build our partner ecosystem, as well as sell directly to large enterprises around the world through our global sales team, which includes people in the US, UK, Germany, France, Singapore, India, Japan, and Australia,” said Singh.

With the new funding, ThoughtSpot will continue to invest in its GTM teams in North America, EMEA, and APAC to meet growing demand, expand R&D efforts, including hiring engineering and product teams, and invest in customer and thought leadership events.

Sudheesh Nair, CEO at ThoughtSpot, has been instrumental in accelerating the company on a trajectory growth.

What makes organizations (your customers) tick with ThoughtSpot? Sudheesh Nair said, “We are the first analytics company to empower business users - not just data analysts or scientists - with direct access to data, and more importantly, the insights that often lay buried in this information. Companies are dealing with data volumes at an unprecedented scale as technologies like IoT, mobile, and the cloud go mainstream. ThoughtSpot’s architecture, which takes a page out of Google’s book, gives our customers the unique ability to get insights quickly at a truly massive scale.”

Also Read: Businesses to succeed faster in fact-driven economy: Sudheesh Nair, ThoughtSpot

ThoughtSpot has been attracting talent across the globe, with the employee count growing by more than 65 percent to nearly 500 employees last year. This includes several new executive hires, such as CEO Sudheesh Nair, VP APJ Sunil Mahale, Chief Data Strategy Officer Cindi Howson, SVP of Products Raja Mukhopadhyay, SVP of World Wide Sales Brian McCarthy, SVP of Business Operations David Freeman, VP of Public Sector Monica McEwen, VP of People Operations Marta Molina Paul, VP of Channels & Alliances Toni Adams, and VP of EMEA operations Spencer Tuttle.

“People are the most important part of any business, but that’s especially true for a fast growing company like ThoughtSpot. Our people build our products, engage with customers, and innovate with partners and more. They are the heart and core of ThoughtSpot,” said Nair.

Insights to Future

Cloud, mobile, and IoT make the world more software-driven, every industry is being transformed, and enterprises are demanding more.

Enterprises are moving to the next generation of analytics with ThoughtSpot to automatically deliver proactive, relevant data-driven insights to every person in their organization, from C-suite executives to front-line employees.

ThoughtSpot allows enterprises to truly reap the benefits of their cloud, IoT, and big data efforts by turning data into insights at scale.

“Our customers are often trying to solve the analytics adoption challenge. They have tools, but getting regular business users to learn and use them has historically been impossible given the complexity involved. Our consumer-like design is simple and intuitive like your favorite app, whether that’s Pinterest, Instagram, or Amazon,” said Nair.

ThoughtSpot system uses AI and machine learning to automatically find and deliver insights to users within seconds, across billions of rows of data, with the company’s in-memory calculation engine. Building the Analytics Ecosystem has been a focus as ThoughtSpot announced partnerships with Google Cloud Platform, Snowflake, Dell, DataRobot, Alteryx, and Carahsoft to help customers tackle challenges across the data pipeline. 

"We are only 2 percent done in achieving our goals on behalf of our customers as we continue to bring fundamental innovation to the market, because that is who we are," said Singh.

“In the long term, there’s a big opportunity to expand, both by going after companies in the midmarket, and by targeting analytics use cases outside business intelligence. The platform approach we’ve taken to building ThoughtSpot means we can adapt and extend our offerings quickly. As part of these efforts, we may use some of the new funding to acquire companies with complementary offerings,” he added.