Business intelligence tools have been a thing for several decades now. When people think about data, they often think of beautiful, colorful dashboards.
Dashboards do have their role to play in the world of data. It’s a small role.
But the real value of data lies elsewhere. Real insights come from specific, deep questions. They come from exploring hypotheses and iterating. Going deeper, comparing, and zooming back out. The type of work that was previously limited to “data people”.
Recent advances in data warehousing and AI allow us to make this kind of work accessible to everyone in the company.
We’re excited to announce Supersimple, a powerful data platform that lets anyone answer complex ad-hoc questions in minutes. Accurately and with zero code. Super-simply.
The point of data is to help people make great decisions. To build great companies. It’s about information and context – not just rows in a database.
It’s ridiculous that we still need to behave like human anomaly detectors, visually scanning for charts that went up or down a bit too much. It’s ridiculous that we still need to use Python to do anything non-trivial with data.
For people to trust AI in a workplace setting, it needs to be… trustworthy. It needs to explain its work and collaborate with humans to solve problems. And this doesn't necessarily mean a chatbot.
At the end of 2021, we founded Supersimple. We called ourselves an “AI company” about a year before ChatGPT took the world by storm. We believed back then, and still do, that AI can take away a lot of the busywork that modern knowledge workers are burdened with.
We started the company after a couple of things clicked:
We knew from the outset that this would be an incredibly complex beast to build. As engineers, this got us excited.
Supersimple connects to existing data warehouses and lets anyone answer complex ad-hoc data questions in minutes. You can do so in a couple of different ways.
First, you can use our no-code UI. Describe your intent using our no-code steps, rather than constructing SQL queries or joining database tables. Supersimple was designed for teams in SaaS companies and ships with the tools you’ll need to measure and improve the things that matter for your team.
Or you can use plain English and let our state-of-the-art AI answer your questions. But our AI still won’t generate SQL or Python for you. Instead, we’ve trained a collection of language models to interact with our platform just like humans do. The AI explains every bit of its work by using the same no-code exploration steps.
This means no hidden hallucinations, ever. When you need to change something or to go deeper, you have the choice – click a button or two, or type in your request. Sometimes natural language wins, and sometimes using a structured UI will feel more natural.
We’ve seen just how critical it is for people to deeply understand the data they’re looking at, in order to be able to draw conclusions. This is why we’ve put explainability at the core of our technology.
To make sure everybody is able to answer their own questions accurately, Supersimple’s data modeling layer lets data teams centralize definitions and abstract away database details. That in turn allows data teams to focus on the more strategic work, instead of answering everyone else’s questions one by one.
We set out to design and build something that’s simple enough for anybody to pick up, yet powerful enough to support the most advanced workflows imaginable. We’re bringing something scary and complex to people who aren’t necessarily data experts or engineers, while also serving those data people and engineers directly.
We’re combining state-of-the-art technology with thoughtful design. For this, we’ve assembled a world-class product engineering and AI team.
To get to where we’re going faster, we’re today announcing $2.2 million in funding from great VCs and operator-turned-angels including Tera Ventures, Specialist VC, Tiny VC, Ott Kaukver, Alvar Lumberg, Indrek Kasela and Märt Kelder.
What we’re really doing is trying to make sure every person in every company has the information they need, at the right time. We’re empowering these companies to do what they were started to do – and to do it well.
This means figuring out what the future of knowledge work will look like in an increasingly AI-enabled world.
We started our journey from working with structured data in data warehouses. But much of organizations’ collective knowledge exists in unstructured data. Think emails, calendars, knowledge bases, Slack messages and code bases.
As we work towards our vision of becoming the operating system for companies, we’ll be bringing all of this together, and making sure the right people have the right bits of context at the right time.
Building out the future of work starts with knowledge – it starts with data.
