Sisu Data Raises $62M to Eliminate Data-Driven Business Errors

Sisu Data Secures $62 Million in Series C Funding

Sisu Data, a company focused on empowering organizations to enhance their decision-making processes, has announced the successful completion of a $62 million Series C funding round. Green Bay Ventures spearheaded the investment.

The funding round also saw participation from existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and NEA, alongside a new contribution from Geodesic Capital. This latest financing brings the total funding raised by the San Francisco-based company, since its establishment in 2018, to over $128 million.

Origins and Mission

Sisu Data was founded by Peter Bailis, a former professor at Stanford University. He transitioned from academic research to dedicate himself fully to the company’s development.

The core objective of Sisu Data is to make the world’s data readily operational, enabling businesses to arrive at the most informed and effective decisions.

“Many organizations currently possess vast quantities of intricate data, yet lack the necessary resources – time, personnel, and appropriate tools – to effectively analyze it,” Bailis explained.

The Problem of Delayed Insights

Bailis highlighted a common challenge: organizations often accumulate more data than they actively utilize. He noted that data collection and consolidation, particularly in cloud environments, are frequently prioritized due to their relative ease and cost-effectiveness.

Business metrics are in a constant state of flux. A delay in recognizing and understanding these changes can lead to significant losses in productivity, time, and financial resources.

Decision Intelligence Engine

Sisu’s “Decision Intelligence Engine” is designed to provide analysts and business leaders with a means to analyze cloud data in real-time. This allows them to not only identify what is happening within their business, but also to understand why it is happening.

Crucially, the engine aims to determine the optimal actions to take in response to these insights. Anthony Schiller, co-managing director at Green Bay Ventures, emphasized that this equips companies with the necessary insights to improve operations, profitability, and overall success.

“Modern organizations have access to detailed information about their users – their origins, behaviors, benefits derived from the product or service, and renewal patterns,” Bailis stated. “The wealth of available data is substantial.”

Growth and Traction

While specific valuation details and revenue figures were not disclosed, Bailis confirmed that Sisu experienced a revenue increase exceeding threefold and demonstrated consistent customer growth over the past year.

The company’s customer base spans diverse industries and includes prominent names such as Mastercard, Samsung, Wayfair, Autodesk, Upwork, and Gusto. Bailis characterized the Series C round as a “preemptive inside round” and noted that Sisu has doubled its team size to 65 employees.

New Product Releases

Sisu announced the upcoming release of two new products this month: Explorations and Dashboards, designed to further its mission of “closing the decision gap.”

Explorations will enable Sisu users to investigate, pivot, and visualize metrics quickly and easily, without the need for coding. Dashboards will allow users to view explorations, monitor metric changes, and share critical data insights with colleagues and executives.

Customers will have the flexibility to visualize their data in a variety of formats, such as tracking revenue by day or week using different graph types, and then collaborate with others within the organization.

Sisu intends to integrate these new tools with its existing analytical capabilities, creating a unified platform for analyzing past events, understanding their causes, and determining appropriate actions – all without requiring any coding.

“Traditional reporting and dashboard approaches can be slow, incomplete, and lack actionable insights,” Bailis explained. “Sisu empowers users to investigate a result, like a revenue decline, and obtain a comprehensive explanation within seconds, directly within the product.”

He added that the machine learning and cloud-native engine “handles all the complex tasks.”

“The primary advantage lies in its simplicity,” Bailis said. “It delivers quick and straightforward answers.”

Investor Perspective

Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner at a16z, cited Bailis’s strong reputation as a key factor in their initial investment.

“I was impressed by Peter’s work at Berkeley and Stanford, particularly as highlighted by his PhD co-advisors Ali Ghodsi and Ion Stoica, founders of Databricks,” Horowitz shared. He revealed that Berkeley’s computer science department even broke its long-standing policy against hiring its own students to attempt to retain Bailis as a faculty member.

The systems developed by Bailis and his team during their academic tenure now form the core of the Sisu engine and were already being utilized by major technology companies like Google and Microsoft at the time of a16z’s initial investment.

“It was remarkable to see these large tech companies, which typically build solutions in-house, adopting software created by a young Stanford professor,” Horowitz said. “It addressed a genuine pain point: even well-funded tech companies lack sufficient analysts to derive meaningful insights from their data.”

A Transformative Technology

Horowitz draws a parallel between Sisu’s innovation and the advent of the spreadsheet.

“Before spreadsheets, businesses relied on manual calculations, a tedious process. The spreadsheet revolutionized financial planning by empowering anyone to perform these tasks,” he explained. “We are now at a similar juncture with decision-making. Humans can effectively process information in two or three dimensions, but their data now exists in hundreds of dimensions, encompassing billions of data points. Consequently, humans struggle to make sound data-driven decisions, and Sisu’s engine has the potential to dramatically simplify this process and reshape the future.”