Savant Labs launched its automation platform for data analysts in 2023. The company, which competes with the likes of Alteryx, on Thursday said it had raised $18.5 million in a Series A round led by Dell Technologies Capital.
Unlike some other low-code/no-code tools, Savant’s focus is squarely on business analysts. Analysts, its CEO and founder Chitrang Shah says, tend to spend a lot of time in spreadsheets, so Savant has put what is essentially a spreadsheet at the core of its user experience. Its no-code graphical user interface is, in many ways, a representation of the workflows and automations the users set up in the spreadsheet.
Before founding Savant Labs, Shah worked at Lattice Engines on machine learning models. After Lattice was acquired by Dun & Bradstreet in 2019, he left in 2021 to start Savant Labs. The way he describes it, Savant Labs is essentially an extension of the work he did at Lattice.
“We were building for business analysts back then, but our product [at Lattice Engines] was centered around sales and marketing use cases only,” he said. “We realized there is a much bigger market beyond sales and marketing, especially in finance, supply chain, HR analytics. The core goes back to this theme I’ve always noticed: There is a big disconnect between supply and demand of analytics. The demand continues to grow with more SaaS apps being deployed, more data being generated. Everybody needs to analyze data.”
Many tools on the market focus on data engineers, Shah argued, and they are the ones typically in charge of automating analytics solutions. But since there are not enough data engineers to go around, analysts are often bottlenecked. That’s a market Alteryx and others pioneered almost two decades ago now, but Shah believes that innovation at these companies has stalled.
“That’s where we saw the opening,” he said. “There’s a like take the baton and carry it forward to the next generation, if you will. We couldn’t have timed it better ourselves. Their customers are looking for alternatives, but also, the technology that is available is evolving rapidly. Especially with AI, we can do things that simply weren’t possible years ago.”
Dell Technologies Capital partner Radhika Malik echoed this. “An enterprise being able to harness the power of its data is no longer a competitive advantage—it’s a business imperative. Legacy tools aren’t rising to the occasion, but fortunately, Chitrang and the team at Savant are,” she said. “What impressed us and led to our investment was their deep technical experience in evolving analytics tools and their clear vision of how AI will transform the experience for the end user analyst and the enterprise as a whole.”
Today, Savant’s users can use standard Excel formulas to create, transforma and manipulate their data, and they can also ask the service’s bot to write formulas for them.
Like virtually all similar services, Savant can connect to data sources ranging from basic spreadsheets in Sharepoint to data warehouses, databases and SaaS apps. It also provides centralized tools for managing how data can be accessed as well as standard role-based access controls and other security features.
It’s worth noting that Savant Labs isn’t trying to go up against other data pipeline companies. Indeed, Shah argues that its approach is quite different, in part because of its interface. “We have an interface where you can drag and drop these tools and build your data workflow if you want,” he said. “But we make it easy by just letting [analysts] work in a spreadsheet interface and [the graphical representation] is an output on the back-end. That’s the major innovation.”
The company is mostly going after larger businesses with more than 1,000 employees at this point. Shah says quite a few Fortune 500 companies are already using its service in industries like healthcare, energy and insurance. Over time, the company also plans to go after small and medium businesses.
“My main thesis is that analytics can’t just be locked down with technical users,” Shah said. “We need to make it available to a broader set of users, but in a way that allows central teams to have governance and oversight. Governance and collaboration is a big gap, and that’s something we are very excited about solving.”
Vertex Ventures, Cota Capital, Village Global, Bloomberg Beta, West Wave Capital and Uncorrelated Ventures also participated in this round. The company has raised a total of $29.5 million so far.
