Business intelligence startup Omni closes $69M funding round

Business intelligence provider Omni Analytics Inc. today disclosed that it has closed a $69 million funding round led by ICONIQ Growth.

Snowflake Ventures and Alphabet Inc.’s GV fund participated as well along with several other institutional investors. The Series B round follows a year in which Omni’s sales grew eightfold. According to TechCrunch, the company now generates nearly $10 million in annualized revenue and expects to triple that number by the end of 2025.

Omni provides a business intelligence platform that allows companies to turn their data into graphs. An online retailer, for example, could create a visualization that tracks which products drive the most revenue. Marketing teams can use Omni dashboards to monitor ad campaign performance.

The data from which a business intelligence tool generates graphs must be organized using a schema. This is a file that specifies how information should be formatted. Often, different departments within a company create different schemas to format their datasets.

The use of multiple schemas in an organization can make it difficult to share information across teams. If the marketing team wishes to share a set of records with the sales group, it might have to switch the files to the sales group’s schema. That can involve a significant amount of work.

Omni addresses the challenge with a so-called shared data model. The feature provides a standardized way of formatting information created by different teams. As a result, a company’s business units can exchange data without time-consuming schema changes.

Omni says that its platform makes it possible to not only share and visualize datasets but also use them in calculations. A business analyst could, for example, run a query that calculates the average price and profit margin of each product in a given spreadsheet column. Omni caches commonly used query results, which removes the need to repeat the computations from scratch every time.

Users can carry out calculations with SQL or Excel syntax. According to Omni, the latter feature eases the learning curve for customers already familiar with Microsoft Corp.’s spreadsheet editor. There’s also an artificial intelligence tool that makes it possible to perform calculations with natural language prompts.

Companies use Omni to visualize business data for their employees. Additionally, the platform is capable of embedding graphs in customer-facing applications. A marketing software provider, for example, could create a dashboard that shows users how well their ads are performing.

When workers start a new business intelligence project, Omni recommends a template from a library of prepackaged visualizations. Workers can switch to a different graph if necessary or create their own with a built-in editor. 

“We built Omni with a layered approach that supports both internal analytics and customer-facing data products,” Omni co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Colin Zima wrote in a blog post. “Omni’s semantic layer grounds AI outputs in a solid data foundation, so whether you’re using natural language, SQL, or any other interface, you get reliable insights.”

Omni will invest its new funding round in product development. The effort will reportedly prioritize the features the company provides for embedding graphs in other applications and processing spreadsheet-based data. In parallel, Omni plans to grow its headcount from 85 employees to 150 by year’s end. 

Image: Omni