ConverSight raises $9M to accelerate data analytics with generative AI

Indianapolis-based ConverSight, a startup that seeks to leverage generative AI to provide better and faster data analytics to enterprises, today announced a $9 million series A round.

The company said it will use the new funding to fuel go-to-market efforts and expand its product with new features, including what it calls “MarketSpace.”

Surface Ventures led the investment, with participation from Techstars, Augment Ventures, Elevate Ventures and multiple earlier backers returning.

With it, ConverSight has raised more than $15 million to date, and the new infusion comes at a critical time, as a number of data infrastructure vendors also seek to use AI large language models (LLMs) to make it easier for teams to control, access and configure their data.

“While many companies have incorporated generative AI into data analytics over the past year, ConverSight has been working on this problem for more than 5 years and we believe has a critical head start in ensuring accuracy for mission-critical analytics,” Gyan Kapur, co-managing partner at Surface VC, said in a statement. “We see the potential for ConverSight’s platform to continue to extend its market leadership…”

What ConverSight offers

Traditionally, businesses relied on developer-generated reports and dashboards to get the visualizations they needed to perform analysis and make decisions. The process was pretty static and took a lot of time, especially considering the pre-analytic steps of data integration, storage, etc.

ConverSight, founded in 2017, created a self-service, all-in-one solution for enterprise customers, covering the whole process end to end, right from data integration and storage to data transformation, analysis and reporting.

“The platform offers the necessary data Infrastructure, data sourcing and data storage (cloud neutral) foundation followed by a thorough data exploration and data transformation process. Once that’s done, the data science and data consumption (visualization) layer follow up, which is rounded off with conversational AI and NLP functionality to drive a totally unique and contextual experience down to the user role, level and department,” Ganesh Gandhieswaran, CEO and cofounder of ConverSight, told VentureBeat.

The conversational AI experience, dubbed Athena, is delivered with the company’s homegrown LLM and patented knowledge graph. It works just like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, where users simply put in their queries through voice or chat and the bot provides the required answer, complete with necessary details and context. 

“Over time, the AI capabilities enable Athena to anticipate questions or insights needed to proactively push insights and reports to end users. It develops a contextual understanding to paint a real-time picture of your business followed by recommendations and automated actions to help teams meet goals and improve decision-making,” Gandhieswaran added.

This, in a nutshell, makes the entire process of analytics consumption more on-demand and dynamic than ever.

Plan to transform data analytics

ConverSight has already established a strong footprint with over 200 enterprise customers and dedicated solutions catering to functions like supply chain, services, sales and procurement. With this round, the company plans to accelerate its go-to-market teams and efforts as well as build out new product innovations to transform how companies consume data analytics. 

This, Gandhieswaran said, will include a new MarketSpace, which will be enterprise teams’ go-to place to discover a curated list of commonly used resources and solution templates. 

“Need to supercharge your inventory management? Try out the inventory optimization resource. Looking to enhance supply chain visibility? The supply chain visibility resource might be just what you need. Each resource comes with detailed explanations of its benefits for subscribers. You can easily subscribe and access these resources for a nominal fee. While payment integration is in the works, for now, a simple subscription process will notify us when you’re ready to dive in,” the CEO explained.

Along with ConverSight, a number of data players are using generative AI to transform how teams interact with their data and consume insights. 

Data lakehouse vendor Databricks, for one, has launched LakehouseIQ to allow anyone in an organization to search, understand and query internal corporate data by simply asking questions in plain English. Similarly, ThoughtSpot has launched Sage, a new LLM-driven search experience that provides enterprise users with a chat experience where they can type natural language prompts to query data for text or visual insights. Dremio and Tableau have also taken similar steps.

According to McKinsey, generative AI, with its promise to unlock new sources of value and innovation, could add up to $4.4 trillion to the global economy.