Over the course of my career, I’ve had the opportunity to found and lead multiple technology companies with great teams. These companies have redefined their industries and empowered customers to work in different, better ways.
At the core of these companies, however, has been a constant mission. A purpose. A north star that guides us over multiple decades. For ThoughtSpot, we’re dedicated to building a more fact-driven world by putting data directly in the hands of people making decisions, whether on the frontlines, in the back office, or in the board room.
While that mission remains the same since our founding, the world around us has been evolving. And we as a company have been evolving, too, helping our customers stay ahead of the competition as they put their data to work.
In the beginning
When we founded the company in 2012, we were the first to bring a search-driven analytics experience to market. At the time, modern cloud data platforms like Snowflake, Google BigQuery, and Databricks didn’t exist and legacy cloud infrastructure wasn’t fast enough for our search engine. For comparison, the largest EC2 instance in terms of memory at the time was 32GB. Now, you can get up to 24,576GB in a single EC2 instance! This meant building a fully-integrated stack to deliver the ease of use of our search experience combined with the speed, accuracy, and security that enterprises require of analytics.
Building in the cloud
As these cloud data platform players emerged, we were able to partner with them and rapidly move to the cloud, thanks to our scale-out architecture that was already built to operate at scale. We continued to build on this foundation, quickly launching our SaaS offering, expanding into embedded analytics, and being a first mover in leveraging generative AI for analytics.
Today, we’re serving over a thousand global customers, from Fortune 500 companies like Verizon, CVS, and Capital One to high growth digital natives like Doordash and Wellthy, revolutionizing how they make decisions and utilize data. Companies in every sector have embraced ThoughtSpot as they break free from the analytics drudgery legacy BI players like Tableau require. The value of the ThoughtSpot platform has driven our SaaS offering to achieve very high organic growth year over year, becoming a vast majority of our business in a short period.
Moving forward: Scaling with our customers in the era of AI
This cloud foundation will help us bring innovation faster to our customers as we embark on the next chapter of our company in this new era of AI. And like with every new chapter, we will evolve and change to align ourselves with where our customers want to go. As we move forward and scale our business to the next level, Sudheesh Nair has stepped down as CEO after leading the company in our second innings as we moved to the cloud.
While AI may be uncharted territory for most businesses, this isn’t a new space for us, where we’re simply bolting a UI on top of LLMs. We have been investing in leveraging AI to drive our enterprise-grade natural language search from the beginning. Combining these investments with the power of generative AI will help our customers leverage AI for real-world use cases.
Over the last couple of years, we’ve also seen more and more customers making ThoughtSpot their BI standard that replaces tools that are now legacy, like Tableau. This wasn’t always the case early on, they have now reached a plateau of productivity with these traditional tools and are keen to create a higher level of business impact from their data and AI initiatives. As we scale, this only strengthens our commitment to customer value - we are increasing investments in helping our customers move to the next generation of analytics that makes their businesses more and more fact-driven.
As I always say, we’re only 2% done. We’re excited to build this future with our customers, partners, and team.
