Cloud analytical solutions company Numerify has raised more than $8 million in an oversubscribed Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. A long list of angels with impressive résumés contributed to the round, lending the company (currently in stealth mode) credibility––not that pre-revenue Numerify needs it.
Founders Guarav Rewari and Srikant Gokulnatha worked at Hyperion, Oracle and MicroStrategy prior to starting Numerify, plus their 50-person team has more than 275 years of experience “in building and marketing analytics products,” according to a company backgrounder. It’s safe to say they’ve been around this particular block before.
Numerify CEO Rewari knew from experience the frustrations faced by those in the business analytics space, and about consumers behavior patterns regarding cloud operational applications versus their analytical cousins. Currently, adoption of cloud operational applications is through the roof, while users have yet to go whole hog with cloud analytics.
But it’s not that consumers aren’t interested; it’s that they’re confused.
“To really make cloud analytics as popular as cloud operational applications, some hard challenges need to be addressed,” Rewari says. “The first and foremost among them is, how do you integrate data that is now sitting not just in on-premise land but also in the cloud world?”
Users gain access to data in the cloud through APIs or jump through hoops for vendors with specific protocols. While ensuring even access to data across premises is possible, it takes a lot of manpower and drudge work, something Rewari knows companies would rather not deal with. “We look at that landscape, and we said goodness, either companies are going to go about solving that manually or by getting in professional services, firms, and paying an arm and a leg,” he says. “Or perhaps we can solve it on their behalf and make it available to them as a cloud service. And that’s what Numerify was created to do.”
Ease of deployment remains crucial to Numerify’s success, as users compare cloud operational applications with analytical solutions. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out Salesforce.com, and won’t need to be one to use Numerify, either.
“We’re giving you a cloud service that provides you analytics on top of your operational cloud applications and on premise applications, and…it’s going to be as easy to deploy and use as the cloud applications themselves, like Salesforce.com,” he says. “It’s [ironic] that these new applications in the cloud are so easy to use that three-to-five-person shops with no IT person in sight are able to get going with Salesforce.com and other products like it; but the minute it comes to analyzing data on top of these systems or a combination of these systems, then it’s time to call in the systems integrator [and such.]”
According to Rewari, not much on the market today compares with Numerify’s approach. Customized analytical solutions atop the application layer come closest, but even then, Rewari says his company’s product has the edge. ‘If you had a handcrafted approach to building an analytical solution on top, guess what? You’ve got to pick up the phone and call those systems integrators back every time there’s a change in the underlying application,” he says. Users save money each time they don’t have to call in a professional to readjust their cloud analytics layer.
Numerify’s got a new word for their fresh methods––one that goes to the heart of what their product does. “The process of getting data out of the different cloud applications that you had, and some on-premise applications into a central repository, so the process of forcing that data, shaping that data, storing that data, and then eventually serving that data is what we’re calling ‘Numerification,’” he says. “And you can either do it through man, which is professional services-intensive, or we believe with our service offering, or product offering, you can do it through machine.”
Rewari says Numerify’s revenue model is subscription-based, and that the company also has direct sales representatives. According to their backgrounder, “interest in Cloud Analytics is rapidly growing and will grow to a $10 billion software market by 2017” (numbers from IDC Business Analytics and Numerify analysis).
More financing may come in the near future. “I think we’ll we look at, potentially, some additional financing sometime next year,” Rewari says.
For this round, Frank Slootman (ServiceNow), Amit Singh (Google Enterprise), Deep Nishar (LinkedIn), James Ramsey (formerly of NetSuite), Abhay Parasnis (Kony, formerly of Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure), and BV Jagadeesh (formerly of NetScaler and Exodus) invested alongside Lightspeed.