Image credits: fluent team
Today, large organizations often employ “business intelligence” (BI) tools to understand what's going on with their operations. This has given rise to many energetic leviathans in the software world. British startup Fluent is applying AI-based large-scale language models (LLMs) to business databases to make research much easier for the average businessman. Completed a $7.5 million seed investment round.
Essentially, BI tools use SQL to connect to business databases, create visualizations, and build BI dashboards. This space involves giants like Tableau (owned by Salesforce), Power BI (owned by Microsoft), Looker (owned by Google), and QuickSight (owned by Amazon), just to name a few.
And the market size is large. According to a report, the global business intelligence market size was valued at $27.11 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow from $29.42 billion in 2023 to $54.27 billion by 2030. I am. Gartner believes the market size could grow even larger as AI and LLM become more widely applied. .
However, data teams spend a lot of time building these dashboards, especially in large organizations. And there's always the challenge of getting people to actually see it. It's a daunting task for data teams to groan at the thought of fulfilling requests that can take days to build.
Instead, Fluent wants to be a “conversation layer” on top of an enterprise's data warehouse, using a natural language LLM. Convert these questions to SQL and automatically generate answers much faster. So, the company claims, anyone can question data and gain insights in simple English, regardless of technical skills or business context.
Of course, this is likely to mean a significant improvement in response time. His CEO at Fluent, Robert Van Den Bergh, said in an interview: That means they're asking more questions, using more data in their work, and putting data within their reach. ” Fluent’s customers already include Bain & Company.
He acknowledged that Fluent “primarily uses Azure OpenAI's GPT4 model,” but stressed that this is not a startup with an “OpenAI wrapper.”
That simplistic approach, he argued, doesn't work for the task of generating accurate SQL, or the right answer to a data question in the context of a BI tool. “Through 18 months of work, we are the answer that organizations like Bain & Company can trust and leverage across their organizations.”
Ian Weber, partner at Bain & Company, said in a statement of support: “Fluent's platform has helped us leverage LLM to explore large, complex datasets and provide insights. Fluent has helped us solve questions that are too complex, especially for pre-built data dashboards. Consultants can get the answers they need quickly, efficiently, accurately, and to specific questions.”
Van Den Bergh said: They don't want to work as a model. They want to know how this client and this client performed. Or how are you doing here? And how is this marketing campaign doing?'' He said that while other players in the market are targeting data users, Fluent is targeting the business market, not the data.
The realm of natural language queries has only recently become possible, so it's not a crowded market.
For example, Metabase is an open source analytics and business intelligence application that allows users to more easily create dashboards. The San Francisco-based company has raised $51 million so far.
Einblick is a US company recently acquired by Databricks (planning to go public). Although it appears to be the closest player in the market to Fluent, Fluent claims that its services are geared toward more technical users within data teams.
Thoughtspot, which claims a $4 billion valuation, also now has a natural language query system.