This week, Sisense, a player in the business intelligence space, announced a $100 million investment. As TechCrunch reported, the round pushed the company’s valuation north of the $1 billion mark, making Sisense the world’s newest unicorn.
That moniker will last a day, we’re sure.
TechCrunch caught up with Sisense CEO Amir Orad and CMO Harry Glaser to discuss the company’s business scale just a few days ago; Sisense is a member in our newly-created $100 million ARR club, having first surpassed the threshold after buying Periscope earlier in 2019 and later with its original operations. What follows is an edited transcript that we’ve shortened to the key bits regarding the round that gifted Sisense its horn.
TechCrunch: Why did you raise now?
Sisense CEO Amir Orad: We have two options. We can continue to stay private, or take the company public one day. What I wanted to have is the optionality to choose what we want to do, and not have any dependency on macroeconomics, elections, [or] geopolitical wars. [The round] allows us to continue being trusted partners with the largest companies out there.
Remember, we are embedded in over 2,000 products and businesses, and they rely on us every day. And [the investment] allows them to continue feeling comfortable. We are good, they are good. And we can choose our own destiny.
How are you going to invest the new capital?
Orad: [The new round] is about continuing to invest in, number one, cloud-native API-first technologies. As you know, all the other analytics products out there are old, and [are not building] API-first, microservices-first [technology]. It’s a big investment area where we have a huge advantage and people really want us to continue investing in it.
And, second is more and more AI machine-learning algorithms necessary to simplify complex data. So this is doubling down on the key themes we’ve been investing in from our three different R&D locations worldwide.
[Orad then discussed go-to-market efforts] We have hired people in Australia and Japan, in London, in Tel Aviv, in Arizona, in San Francisco, in New York. Customers want to be with them, and larger enterprise clients want to be next to them.
How do you think about Tableau and other BI companies that you compete with in terms of product capabilities?
I want to be very clear: the previous generation [of BI tools], which was visualization first — and Tableau spearheaded that market — is amazing technology that is focused on visuals and on simpler datasets.
The minute the data becomes complex, the minute you want to do machine-learning algorithms, the minute you want to get into high-scale, high-concurrency [work] that generation is not up to par with what Sisense is doing. We were born in a generation that is cloud-first, API-first — that allows us to leverage all the abilities of the cloud, all the abilities of microservice deployments, all the abilities of the big AI engines in the cloud.
What we do is not needed when things are simple. But the minute your data project is complex, large, [has] many data sources, [or] advanced machine learning algorithms, we’re by far a different generation [in terms of] architecture and capabilities. And that’s our focus.
How important was the valuation for the round?
I can share with you that the round was oversubscribed, so we had multiple people wanting to invest. All of them were at a valuation over a billion dollars. That was not a topic; we didn’t count the number of digits.
But I can also tell you that we did not go shopping to 100 investors, into multiple roadshows, to try and max out the valuation. The number one priority is to run the business, give our clients value. And the valuation game is really less significant at this stage of the company. […] As long as it’s a healthy valuation, it doesn’t matter that much and becomes a vanity metric if you are a bit higher, or a bit lower.
Are you considering acquisitions now that the round has closed?
We’re looking to buy companies all the time. So acquisitions, acquiring technology and amazing tools is always on the table. For our job, [at the] end of the day it is very simple, it’s actually not that hard to run a company: Give a lot of value to our clients, and hire a lot of good people to continue giving value to our clients.
[When we] do those two things, many good things happen after them.