Right now, large organizations often use “business intelligence” (BI) tools to understand what the heck is going on within their operations. This has created many leviathans in the software world.
Now, UK startup Fluent has closed a $7.5 million investment round led by Hoxton Ventures and Tiferes Ventures to apply large artificial intelligence-based language models (LLM) to enterprise databases, making them much easier to query than the average human.
Essentially, BI tools connect to a business database and use SQL to create visualizations and create BI dashboards. There are huge companies involved in this space: Tableau (owned by Salesforce), Power BI (owned by Microsoft), Looker (owned by Google), and QuickSight (owned by Amazon) to name just a few. handful.
The solution market is huge. According a reportthe global business intelligence market 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. Gartner believes it could be even larger if artificial intelligence and LLM are more widely applied.
However, data teams spend a lot of time building these dashboards, especially for large organizations. And there’s always the challenge of getting people to actually use them—a tough job when data teams cringe at the thought of fulfilling requests that could take days to build.
Instead, Fluent wants to be a “conversational layer” through natural language LLMs that sit on top of a company’s data warehouse. It translates those questions into SQL and generates those answers much faster. So anyone, regardless of technical skills or business context, can ask questions in plain English about their data and get insights, according to the company.
Of course, this is likely to significantly shorten response times. Robert Van Den Bergh, CEO of Fluent, told me, “Advisors are moving from waiting two weeks for an image to 30 seconds. That means they ask a lot more questions, use a lot more data in their work. Data becomes something that is now at their disposal.”
Fluent’s customers already include Bain & Company.
While he admits that Fluent “predominantly uses Azure OpenAI’s GPT4 model,” he emphasized that this is not an “OpenAI wrapper” startup.
This simplistic approach doesn’t work for generating accurate SQL and therefore correct answers to data questions within BI tools, he claimed. “Through 18 months of work, we’ve been able to create a method to achieve response accuracy that organizations like Bain & Company can trust and leverage across their organizations.”
Ian Weber, partner at Bain & Company, said in a supporting statement: “Fluent’s platform has helped us leverage LLMs to interrogate and deliver insights from large, complex datasets. Fluent allows our advisors to quickly get the answers they need efficiently and accurately, especially for questions too complex or specific to pre-built data dashboards.”
Van Den Bergh said: “All entrepreneurs want are answers to questions. They don’t want to go into modeling. They want to know how this customer performed against that customer. Or how [they are] does here. And how that marketing campaign is performing.” He said other players in the market are targeting data users, while Fluent is targeting the business market, not data.
The natural language search space has only recently become viable, so it is not yet a saturated market.
For example, Transition is an open source analytics and business intelligence application that allows users to more easily create dashboards. The SF-based company has raised $51M to date.
Einblick, an American company recently acquired by Databricks (which is going public), appears to be the closest player to Fluent in the market. However, Fluent claims that Einblick’s offering is geared toward more technical users within data groups.
ThoughtSpot, which has he claimed a $4 billion valuation, now also has a natural language search engine.
