Natural Language Business Analytics Company DataRPM Raises $5.1M

Joining the fray of business intelligence companies developing natural language search for data analysis, DataRPM has raised $5.1 million.

The Washington DC-based startup raised its Series A round from new investor InterWest Partners and previous seed investor CIT GAP Funds as competition in this new arena of business intelligence heats up.

A lot of business intelligence software has been developed with data scientists and engineers in mind as the end users. But over the past several years, as corporations collect increasing amounts of data about their operations, we’ve seen the emergence of business intelligence software that can be used by everyday employees.

Companies like ClearStory Data backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Google Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz; and Looker, which raised a $16 million Series A round last year from Redpoint Ventures and First Round Capital, are both developing similar technologies.

All of these companies are competing for a piece of the roughly $36 billion market for business intelligence software, according to DataRPM chief executive Sundeep Sanghavi (that’s a pretty big pie to slice).

A serial entrepreneur, Sanghavi launched DataRPM after founding the venture-backed companies Razorsight (a predictive analytics technology developer) and SearchRidge. Both of those companies are still operating under new management.

“You can’t ride many horses, you have to ride one, so DataRPM is the only horse I’m riding,” Sanghavi said of his previous entrepreneurial adventures.

With DataRPM it’s less about horses than about horsepower, given where the data analytics market is heading, Sanghavi said.

“What took 16 months to implement we can do that in 30 days,” Sanghavi said of the time it takes to install his company’s a hybrid on premises and cloud-based business analytics software to a customer. “[Then] you ask a question using a natural language tool and get a visualized  answer.”

DataRPM unveiled its alpha product in March and conducted beta tests in August of 2013. The company now has 17 customers in markets like financial services, telecommunications, media, and even software developers, and 25 employees — including several at research and development facilities in Bangalore.

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