Startup Stories: Spencer Tuttle, VP EMEA at ThoughtSpot

ThoughtSpot was founded in 2012 with a very specific mission: to build a fact-driven world by empowering anyone, regardless of their technical skills, to access data and find insights. Our co-founders Ajeet Singh and Amit Prakash, who are now Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer respectively, believe the combination of cloud, search, and AI have made it possible to imbue every conversation with insights that lead to better outcomes for businesses in any industry.

It’s a reality that’s coming true through the work we’re doing with our customers – these include BT, JD Sports and JustEat in the UK.

What they do

We help organisations transform the way they use and access their data by giving them fast and easy access to insights. It provides any person within a business the ability to analyse data, find insights based on that data, and take action in seconds.

We pride ourselves on the platform’s user-friendly experience; unlike the static dashboards and reports found in other analytics tools, ThoughtSpot is built on making data searchable, in the same way Google has made web information searchable. This allows both skilled data workers and line of business employees to easily access the information they need to do their jobs more effectively quickly and with accuracy.

The platform not only provides answers to the questions that employees know to ask, but also those that they might not. SpotIQ, our AI engine, leverages machine learning and automation to provide suggestions for other areas of exploration. As people search to analyse their data in ThoughtSpot, the platform learns what’s important and tunes its algorithms to provide more relevant insights.

In the era of information overload, it can be difficult and time-consuming for businesses to sort through their data and extract meaningful insights — and even trickier to find people who know how to do so. With our platform, organisations no longer need to look to analysts and data scientists to complete these tasks. Unlike competing platforms, ThoughtSpot users don’t need to learn a new query language or spend hours of training on complicated, non-intuitive user interfaces.

This brings a key advantage: not only is it easy for non-technical users to ask questions, but it also allows data analysts to allocate more time to more important business tasks than building reports and dashboards for colleagues.

The Future

Looking to the future, the next frontier for us lies in SaaS.

Historically, enterprise analytics has been slow in moving to the cloud, held back by limited and slow-growing network bandwidth, data gravity remaining on-premises, fragmentation of data in multiple clouds, and concerns around security. With the rise of cloud data warehouses like Snowflake and Amazon Redshift, however, that’s all changed.

In order to fully tap into the value of these cloud investments, organizations need a new front end that provides line-of-business workers and analysts with the flexibility to glean instant insights from data in the cloud at an enterprise scale.

It’s always been the company’s mission to make data accessible to everyone – with the launch of ThoughtSpot Cloud, we are pursuing that goal even further by making it easier than ever to unleash the power of data quickly, wherever it lives.