Zenlytic Profile

“Zenlytic makes self-serve analytics possible by offering a specially-designed business intelligence tool with an AI data analyst. Using Zenlytic is ~2,000x faster than asking a data person on your team.”

“My co-founder and I first founded a data consultancy, where we deployed a lot of BI tools. The technical clients who understood SQL loved them but non-technical users generally struggled to get the same value. So we set out to build a better self-serve BI tool – in 2020. Interestingly, we were too early. We always incorporated natural language capabilities into Zenlytic (my co-founder and I met studying AI at Harvard uni), but things really accelerated once LLM capabilities improved dramatically in late 2022.”

“We've raised two rounds of funding, led by Primary Ventures (pre-seed), and Bain Capital Ventures (seed), respectively.”

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“11 people. We really index on two things: agency and fire in the belly. Domain knowledge and experience really don't factor much for us.”

“Our target market is mid-market. They have an (overworked) small data team and a cloud data warehouse. And a bunch of end users waiting for their insights. Other than that, we're vertical-agnostic. Our two biggest are ecommerce and financial services. But we work with SaaS, consumer tech, healthtech, and fintech as well.”

“Mostly going on podcasts and public speaking events, then people email us. But we also do product-led sales as well.”

“Probably our speaking engagements. It's worked well because it's authentic and not sales-y. We're passionate about just sharing what we've learned about AI, data analytics, and engineering, and we're genuinely excited just to put value out into the universe.”

“We fluked out. We happen to have deep data expertise and deep LLM expertise, and we were in the late (but malleable) stages of building a BI tool right when the LLM revolution happened. Building BI tools is hard. Deploying LLMs in the real world is very hard. Understanding the modern data stack is complex. And we've assembled a team that not only understands these things but does them better than anyone else out there.”

“The hardest part about the early stage is prioritization. I disagree a bit with the prevailing knowledge to 'keep experimenting' at the early stage. There's so many interesting directions you can take everything; it's actually too tempting to keep experimenting instead of committing to the most important decisions.”

“I was pretty surprised how much gratitude I have for the people who believe in you. Everyone always says they're rooting for you, but actions speak so much louder than words. Every investor who wrote what felt like huge checks, every customer who came on when there was just a couple of logos on the website, every team member who decided they like what we're doing enough to dedicate the entirety of their professional time and energy to it. It chokes me up a bit.”

“Don't wait until you have the perfect idea and the perfect opportunity. Those don't exist, almost by definition: if the idea was perfect it would be super crowded already. Instead, build things that you're passionate about and keep increasing the 'surface area of luck.' They say entrepreneurs are the type who jump off a cliff and build a plane on the way down. That's not just a personality trait; it's a necessary condition for every successful startup.”