The idea of making complex analytics software more like the sleek consumer apps that workers use when they’re off the clock is nothing new in the vendor community. But no provider has taken the concept quite as far as ThoughtSpot Inc., which raised $50 million as part of a new funding round announced this morning to promote its simplified approach to data processing.

The four-year-old startup’s namesake software hides the complexity of an organization’s analytics infrastructure behind a straightforward search bar designed to handle like Google. A worker can enter a short phrase describing what they’re looking for in natural language terms, and have the algorithms behind the hood fetch the results deemed most relevant to the query. The difference is that ThoughtSpot looks for matches not on the open web, but rather the internal information troves of the user’s company.

The software can sift through everything from unstructured data in the organization’s on-premise Hadoop cluster to the relational customer records that the marketing department keeps on Salesforce.com. After finding information that matches the user’s description, ThoughtSpot’s algorithms connect the dots (across different storage systems, if necessary) and present the results in the form of a visual graph. The startup says that this correlation capability enables its software to fetch highly specific details like the amount of revenue that a product generated in a given quarter, or the number of new customers that were acquired during the same period.

The fact that the process is performed without the user having to so much as write a SQL query can dramatically speed up access to information for a company’s workforce. Decision-makers gain the ability to quickly fetch high-level business intelligence when the need arises, while the analysts normally who handle the chore are left with more time to spend on other projects. As a result, those projects end up getting completed faster as well, meaning productivity increases all around.

ThoughtSpot’s sales pitch has apparently struck a chord in the enterprise. The startup claims to have seen sales increase 810 percent in the past year thanks to deals with major brands such as Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. and Nutanix Inc., co-founder Ajeet Singh’s previous venture. The capital from today’s round will be used to grow its customer roster even further and develop new analytics features. 

Image via ThoughtSpot