“Our first and immediate need is to build out our sales and marketing customer support functions,” said Kaycee Lai, CEO and founder of Promethium in an interview with ZDNet. Proceeds from the financing will be used to expand customer growth, sales and marketing, and innovation. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based AI data analytics provider said the Series A financing was led by private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners, along with investors .406 Ventures and Zetta Venture Partners. The latest round of financing now brings the total amount of funding to $34.5 million.
How it works
Promethium describes itself as an ad-hoc self-service data and analytics platform for non-technical data and analytics teams. Its data profiling technology reimagines data analytics by enabling more people to leverage data without having a deep technical understanding of data infrastructures or waiting for data engineers to process requests, which can take weeks or months. “We found a way to very quickly, and intelligently, connect to any data source you have,” said Lai, who noted that Promethium supports more than 200 data sources – from SaaS applications such as Salesforce, to new cloud warehouses as well as legacy relational database management systems. “Whatever you have, there’s probably very little chance that we can’t connect to it.” The Promethium platform, in its upfront ease and back-office complexity, doesn’t beat around the bush with its users, even first-time users. Data queries, for example, are expressed in English, not code. Lai told ZDNet that the first thing Promethium does out of the box is show the user every table that the user has written, that’s instantly searchable and filterable – by size, frequency, by vendor, by type – in one place and with a simple user interface. “The day-one value is global visibility into what you have, where it is, what’s being used and what’s not being used. Without that global visibility, we still end up working in silos, so we believe that that’s where you start first,” Lai said. “What we do that’s unique to everyone is that we do it without having to move data, without having to crawl your existing data sources – and we’ve seen other solutions claiming they can do this but by the time you crawl all your database networks in your warehouse, six months has gone by.” Promethium also enables the user the ability to tinker with their enterprise-wide data, build upon it, run models with other data to come to a solution without having to jump from one tool to another. Lai says that this is where the data analytics industry fails users. “This is where the industry says, ‘Sorry, if you want to do that you need to leave the product.’ Oracle is Oracle, Snowflake is Snowflake and you have to use those tools to put your data together. We let you do it right there, on the spot; it’s virtual but it looks physical,” he says, adding that the customer doesn’t know that Promethium doesn’t physically move the data but rather the user sees everything that they need to see in one place. “There’s a layer of using AI to instantly understand not just what you have but in relationships both existing and perpetual…and based on that we then help you realize those relationships into data maps, data models, and data sets and then be able to actually see what would happen.” In addition to helping build and query data, Promethium helps users visualize the answers – such as in the form of charts – using its AI technology to interpret data visually.
Looking ahead in 2022
In addition to building out its sales and marketing customer support functions, Lai says his company plans to get ahead of high product requests and demands by expanding on engineering and to continue innovation to make Promethium faster, easier, more user-friendly, and to go one step further by anticipating a user’s need for using it. For this year, Lai said he’d like to be able to collaborate more with other players in the data analytics market, whereby Promethium can be a part of the offering that other players have. What’s more, Lai said that as the company continues to beef up and invest in its security, he would like to reach out to the financial services industry. To do that requires a bigger staff. Promethium currently has a staff of about 20, working virtually, and Lai is hoping to triple staff this year. “We’re a growing team, so we’re on a good lookout for top talent to help join this small band of motley crew to change and disrupt the market,” he said.
