Top 10 Business Intelligence software

Latest news about Business Intelligence software

2022. Google unifies its BI services under the Looker brand



Google Cloud today announced that it is unifying all of its business intelligence products under the Looker brand. It brings together Looker, Data Studio, and core Google technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). This combination, Google argues, will allow users to go beyond traditional dashboards - the kind Google Data Studio specializes in - and allow businesses to bring this data into more of their workflows and applications to make data-driven decisions. As part of this move, Google Data Studio will now become Looker Studio. Looker was a startup that Google acquired in 2020 for $2.6 billion. So, from now Google officially competes with Tableau, Microsoft Power BI and QlikView.


2022. Omni looks to take on Looker with its cloud-powered BI platform



Omni is a new BI platform that aims to simplify working with data across an organization. While legacy BI platforms unified teams around reliable, centralized data, it still meant a heavy upfront data modeling process. Omni is filling the gap between instant-gratification analytics and the reliability and governance of mature enterprise BI. Omni is comparable to existing BI tools like the aforementioned Looker and Tableau. But the platform can also take raw SQL — the language used to communicate with databases — and break it into modeled components. Omni’s built-in tools generate data models and components from SQL, creating a “sandbox” data model and allowing users to promote metrics to the official, shared model that the whole organization can use. Investors believe in Omni’s vision, having pledged $26.9 million toward the startup.

2022. BI dashboard service Explo garners $12M Series A



Explo, that develops a tool for building customized business intelligence dashboards with a look and feel of your own company, which you can embed in your website or email to customers, has raised $12 million Series A. The company is also announcing the official launch of their self-service product with a two-week trial period. Companies can connect to Explo their databases or data warehouses to have the information that they want to be able to analyze. Explo connects directly to these databases, whether it’s Postgres or data warehouses like Snowflake, and then give all of our customers a myriad of ways to kind of share data. The startup currently has 45 paying customers on the books with many others in the process of trying the product.


2021. Zoho Analytics 5.0 uses AI and ML to assist you in getting insights from your data


Zoho unveiled a new version of its self-service BI & analytics platform Zoho Analytics. It now includes Zoho DataPrep - an augmented data preparation and management service, available on the cloud, Zoho Analytics Embedded BI - offering ISVs and developers to integrate Zoho Analytics seamlessly into their product/solution offering and Zoho Analytics Marketplace, which allows partners and third-party vendors to build analytics apps on top of Zoho Analytics and market in Zoho Marketplace. Also included are Zoho Analytics Native Apps, apps built by us and natively embedded within third-party apps, and available in their marketplaces. With inbuilt AI assistant Zia, there’s no need to learn complex SQL querying. You can hold colloquial conversations with Zia, and get the answers you need as relevant reports.


2021. No-code business intelligence service y42 raises $2.9M



Berlin-based y42, a data warehouse-centric business intelligence service that promises to give businesses access to an enterprise-level data stack that’s as simple to use as a spreadsheet, today announced that it has raised a $2.9 million seed funding. The service, which was founded in 2020, integrates with more than 100 data sources, covering all the standard B2B SaaS tools, from Airtable to Shopify and Zendesk, as well as database services like Google’s BigQuery. Users can then transform and visualize this data, orchestrate their data pipelines and trigger automated workflows based on this data.


2021. Jedox raises $100M to expand its financial modeling and analytics software to more verticals



Jedox, a German startup that builds tools to help companies with their financial planning and analysis using data sourced from basic documents like Excel spreadsheets, has picked up a funding of over $100M. The company’s software was originally built to work on-premises or in the cloud, and mainly oriented toward financial planners. Over the last several years, Jedox has expanded that to a wider set of adjacent users, specifically in HR planning and procurement, and the plan with this funding is to expand Jedox’s applicability into an even wider set of use cases and verticals.


2020. Explo snags $2.3M to help build customer-facing BI dashboards



Explo, a startup which is helping customers build customer-facing business intelligence dashboards, has raised a $2.3 million seed round. The company originally was looking at a way to simplify getting data ready for models or other applications, but as the founders spoke to customers, they saw a big need for a simple way to build dashboards backed by that data and quickly pivoted.


2020. MachEye raises $4.6M for its AI-based business intelligence platform



There are quite a lot business intelligence (BI) platforms that aim to make data analysis accessible to everybody in a company. Most of them are still fairly complicated, no matter what their marketing copy says. MachEye, which is launching its AI-powered BI platform today, is offering a new twist on this genre. It’s approach is definitely unique - generating audio-visuals on enterprise data. But it also offers all of the usual trappings of a BI service. If you really want dashboards, you can build those, and developers can use the company’s APIs to use their data elsewhere, too. The service can pull in data from most of the standard databases and data warehousing services, including AWS Redshift, Azure Synapse, Google BigQuery, Snowflake and Oracle. The company promises that it only takes 30 minutes from connecting a data source to being able to ask questions about that data.


2020. Index nabs $2.6M seed to create BI dashboards without coding



Index, the startup that helps non-technical users build business intelligence dashboards without coding has raised $2.6M. The product allows anyone in the company build their own metrics for their teams. End users can connect to a growing list of data sources and Index deals with building the queries and displaying the data for the users without data scientists or data analysts to help. For now, that includes Salesforce and Hubspot for CRM data, Stripe payments data and certain databases from Postgres and MongoDB.


2020. Grid raises $12M Series A to turn spreadsheets into visual narratives



Grid, a SaaS startup that lets you turn spreadsheets into visual “narratives,” has closed $12 million in Series A funding. Grid is on a mission to change the way knowledge workers interact with data. It enables you to turn spreadsheet workbooks into visual and interactive websites so that the data residing in them can be better communicated to various audiences. During Grid’s private beta period, the startup saw two core use cases. The first was model presentation, such as a consultant or a business analyst that has built a spreadsheet model and needs to communicate how the inputs affect the outcomes. The second is reporting, seeing Grid used by anyone that needs to regularly report data they’ve pulled together in a spreadsheet.


2020. Supermetrics raises €40M to bring all your marketing data together



Supermetrics, the data management and analysis tool for marketers, has raised €40 million in new funding. It's a SaaS tool that helps marketers compile data in a “ready-to-use format” that is compatible with their data crunching and reporting tool(s) of choice. The idea is to provide a unified view of various disparate marketing data so that marketing teams and other stakeholders can see what is and isn’t performing — and more easily course correct or double down. Supermetrics is also designed to be used by non-engineers, and without the need to add another codebase to a company’s IT stack.


2020. Quantexa raises $64.7M to bring big data intelligence to risk analysis and investigations



Quantexa - the company that built a machine learning platform branded “Contextual Decision Intelligence” (CDI) that analyses disparate data points to get better insight into nefarious activity, as well as to (more productively) build better profiles of a company’s entire customer base - has picked up $64.7 million, a Series C. The startup built its business on the back of doing work for major banks and others in the financial services sector, and the plan will be to continue enhancing tools for that vertical while also expanding into two growing opportunities: working with insurance and government/public sector organizations.


2020. Truthset raises $4.75M to help marketers score their data



Marketing data quality startup Truthset has raised $4.75 million in seed funding. The company scores the consumer data that marketers are buying on accuracy, on a scale between 0.00 and 1.00. To create these scores, Truth{set} checks the data against independent data sources, as well as first-party data and panels. The platform can even “suppress” consumer IDs that don’t meet a marketer’s standards, so that they’re not used in targeting. And it's compatible with demand-side platforms, data management platforms and customer platforms. It also integrates with the leading data providers, including Facebook, LiveRamp and The Trade Desk.


2020. Retina raises $2.5M for its AI-powered customer analysis software



Casting a cold eye on customer behavior and their future lifetime value has brought the Los Angeles-based startup Retina $2.5 million in new funding. Vendors can use Retina’s Shopify app to process data and get a predicted customer lifetime value. For sellers who aren’t integrated with Shopify, they can have their data processed by Retina to get that predicted customer value. Retina bases its analysis on recency, frequency and churn rates to map out customer acquisition, according to the company’s spokesperson. The software collects that data by analyzing the log of previous transactions in a customer data or payment platform, according to a statement.


2020. Sisense nabs $100M for accessible big data business analytics



Sisense, an enterprise startup that that has built a business analytics business out of the premise of making big data as accessible as possible to users — whether it be through graphics on mobile or desktop apps, or spoken through Alexa — has picked up $100 million funding that it plans to use to continue building out its tech, as well as for sales, marketing and development efforts. Sisense, bringing in both sleek end user products but also a strong theme of harnessing the latest developments in areas like machine learning and AI to crunch the data and order it in the first place, represents a smaller and more fleet of foot alternative for its customers.


2019. Celonis, a leader in big data process mining for enterprises, nabs $290M



German company Celonis, a leader in the area of process mining — which tracks data produced by a company’s software, as well as how the software works, in order to provide guidance on what a company could and should do to improve it — has raised $290 million in a Series C round of funding, giving the startup a post-money valuation of $2.5 billion. The core of Celonis’ offering is to provide process mining around an organizations’ IT systems. In recent times, the company has started to expand the system into a wider set of use cases, by providing tools to monitor operations and customer experience, and to apply its process mining engine to a wider set of company sizes beyond large enterprises, and by bringing in more AI to its basic techniques.


2019. Customer data analytics software Heap raised $55M


Heap, the startup that wants to take on the analytics incumbents, has raised $55 million. The company says it now has more than 6,000 customers, including Twilio, AppNexus, Harry’s, WeWork and Microsoft. With this new funding, Heap has raised a total of $95.2 million. The plan is to fund international growth, as well as expand the product, engineering and go-to-market teams. Heap offers an innovative approach to automating a company’s analytics, enabling a variety of teams within an organization to obtain the data they need to make educated and, ultimately, smarter decisions.


2019. Salesforce acquires data visualization company Tableau for $15.7B


Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7 billion in an all-stock deal. This is a huge deal for Salesforce as it continues to diversify beyond CRM software and into deeper layers of analytics. The company reportedly worked hard to — but ultimately missed out on — buying LinkedIn (which Microsoft picked up instead), and while there isn’t a whole lot in common between LinkedIn and Tableau, this deal will also help Salesforce extend its engagement (and data intelligence) for the customers that Salesforce already has — something that LinkedIn would have also helped it to do. This also looks like a move designed to help bulk up against Google’s move to buy Looker, announced last week.


2019. Predictive sales startup People.ai raises $60M



People.ai, which has built a platform to ingest all the data that salespeople generate in the course of their work, and then use it to provide guidance to them to help source and close more deals, is today announcing that it has raised another $60 million in funding, which it will use to continue growing the business and building partnerships with new channels, such as system integrators to target bigger enterprises. Alongside this, it is also launching a new product that it calls “The Wire” — a feed of insights that salespeople can access to find leads, pick up tips on how to approach them and ultimately to sell to them.


2018. Zoho Analytics got AI-powered Assistant



Zoho Analytics now sports the AI-powered Zia, Zoho’s intelligent assistant. Whether it be questions like ‘Get me the support tickets received this month, by product by region’ or ‘Give me sales by country by channel’, you just ask Zia. Zia converts such questions asked in natural language to complex SQL queries in the back end, and comes up with multiple relevant report suggestions. You can save the suggestion that best suits you as a report directly. Besides, the new Zoho Analytics makes it easier to analyze data from across apps, and to easily create interactive reports and dashboards and predicts future trends accurately based on their past data. Also Zoho Analytics adds seven new connectors for popular business apps. Each of these connectors come with more than 100 pre-built domain-specific reports and KPI dashboards that users can benefit from right away.


2018. Oracle acquires predictive intelligence platform DataFox



Oracle has acquired DataFox, a startup that has amassed a huge company database — currently covering 2.8 million public and private businesses, adding 1.2 million each year — and uses AI to analyse that to make larger business predictions. The business intelligence resulting from that service can in turn be used for a range of CRM-related services: prioritising sales accounts, finding leads, and so on. The combination of Oracle and DataFox will enhance Oracle Cloud Applications with an extensive set of AI-derived company-level data and signals, enabling customers to reach even better decisions and business outcomes. DataFox will sit among Oracle’s existing portfolio of business planning services like ERP, CX, HCM and SCM.


2018. Adobe introduced AI assistant for Adobe Analytics



Adobe introduced an AI-fueled virtual assistant called Intelligent Alerts to help Adobe Analytics users find deeper insights they might have otherwise missed. The way it works is the analyst receives some alerts they can dig into to give them additional insights. If they don’t like what they’re seeing, they can tune the system and it should learn over time what the analyst needs in terms of data. They can configure how often they see the alerts and how many they want to see. This all falls within the realm of Adobe’s artificial intelligence platform they call Sensei. Adobe built Sensei with the idea of injecting intelligence across the Adobe product line.


2018. Tableau acquired AI-analytics startup Empirical Systems



Enterprise BI giant Tableau has acquired Empirical Systems, an early stage startup with AI roots. Their product is still in private Beta. It is delivered currently as an engine embedded inside other applications. That sounds like something that could slip in nicely into the Tableau analytics platform. What’s more, it will be bringing the engineering team on board for some AI knowledge, while taking advantage of this underlying advanced technology. Empirical was developed to make complex data modeling and sophisticated statistical analysis more accessible, so anyone trying to understand their data can make thoughtful, data-driven decisions based on sound analysis, regardless of their technical expertise.


2018. Tableau gets a new data preparation tool



Data analytics platform Tableau launched a new data preparation tool. The general idea here is to give users a visual way to shape and clean their data, something that’s especially important as businesses now often pull in data from a variety of sources. Tableau Prep can automate some of this, but the most important aspect of the service is that it gives users a visual interface for creating these kind of workflows. Prep includes support for all the standard Tableau data connectors and lets users perform calculations, too. Also the company added server plan for businesses that want to deploy the service on-premises or on a cloud platform, and a fully hosted online plan. Prices for these range from $35 to $70 per user and month.


2018. MariaDB acquires big data analytics company MammothDB



MariaDB, known as a drop-in replacement for the popular MySQL database, clearly has its sights set on a bigger market and is looking to expand and better challenge the likes of Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. Today the company announced that it has acquired MammothDB, a big data business analytics service based in Bulgaria. With MariaDB AX, MariaDB already offers an analytics and data warehousing system. So the company plans to bring the MammothDB’s expertise in this area to bear on MariaDB AX.


2017. Tableau reveals Linux version



Business Intelligence software provider Tableau announced Tableau Server on Linux, which gives a new option to users who do not want to run it on Windows Server. Besides, Tableau acquired HyPer, a startup that created Hyper, a main memory database for precisely that reason. It brings performance, faster loading and scalability according to Ajenstat. It replaces Tableau's TDE database, and is part of Tableau 10.5 which is available now in beta. Also Tableau has opened its API, inviting users to integrate and work with third-party applications directly in Tableau.


2017. Zoho Reports gets mobile phone app



Zoho Reports has been available for the iPad and Android tablets for quite some time now. Now Zoho added phone-compatible apps for both iOS and Android. The app helps you with analytics on the go, and to get useful insights from your data, anywhere anytime, all from the palm of your hand. It allows to view and explore all the reporting databases in Zoho Reports that you created by Folders, Types and Related Views, and also those shared to you. You can mark the dashboards & reports that you access often as Favorites. With the Recent Views tab, you can quickly access the views you last opened.


2017. Tableau acquired natural language processing startup ClearGraph



Business intelligence solution provider Tableau has acquired ClearGraph, a service that lets you query and visualize large amounts of business date through natural language queries. Tableau expects to integrate this technology with its own products as it looks to make it easier for its users to use similar queries to visualize their data. Recent advances in natural language processing and machine learning now allow ClearGraph and alternative services to understand more about the underlying database and then take these sentences and essentially translate them into database queries. Given that Microsoft’s Power BI and other competitors already offer this capability, it’s no surprise that Tableau is also looking into this.


2016. Tableau to launch visual data-prep software with deep learning



Tableau is moving into the data-wrangling business, announcing plans for visual data-preparation software code-named Project Maestro. The idea is to bring the same sort of "self-service" visualization to the prepping and cleaning of data as they've built for data analysis. Besides the company is going to implement Natural Language Processing (NLP) to bring new ways to interact with data through human language such as voice and text and Tableau Machine Algorithms which will surface recommendations for workbooks and data sources that are trusted, highly used and contextually relevant to individual workflows. The software is expected to be available "later next year."


2016. Qlik updates its BI and analytics engine



Qlik, the provider of Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms,  unveiled the new QlikView Enterprise 3.0 release, including improved visual analytics, advanced support for custom analytics apps, embedded BI and developer innovations. Qlik Enterprise 3.0 also includes a new development hub so that users can more easily take full advantage of the Qlik Analytics Platform for web mashups, custom apps, and extensions. It offers a new app integration API, a visualization API for programmatic creation of analytics, and a new integrated developer environment (IDE) plugin for Visual Studio.