Definite bags $10M in funding to replace clunky big-data warehouses, connectors and BI tools

A startup called Definite reckons it can help businesses to do away with their clunky big-data stacks and business intelligence tools after raising $10 million in seed funding today.

The round was led by Coatanoa and saw participation from Acrew Capital and a number of strategic angel investors.

Definite, officially known as Luabase Inc., is the creator of an all-encompassing, full-stack and artificial intelligence-native data platform. Its goal is to help enterprises to rip out a mix of costly big-data tools, replacing them with something that’s much simpler to set up and significantly more affordable.

As the startup explains, most businesses today have to juggle a costly mix of different data tools. They commonly rely on a data warehouse such as Snowflake to store their information, and link this to an extract, transform and load service such as Fivetran. Then, they’ll hook up a business intelligence tool such as Looker, which is used to dig up insights from their data.

Definite says companies can now swap out that entire stack and replace it with its simple, plug-and-play platform, which combines a secure open-source data lake with ready-made data pipelines and a comprehensive set of BI dashboards to visualize data-based insights.

The startup says one of the most compelling things about its platform is how easy it is to get up and running. It comes with more than 500 pre-built data connectors off the bat, so companies can easily integrate whatever software systems they’re using, be it a customer relationship management platform such as Salesforce, a human resource management tool such as Workday, various databases, spreadsheets, marketing tools and billing systems, to name just a few.

Once they’re all hooked up, that’s where the magic begins. Definite grabs all of the data from those systems, creates a clean copy of it within its own data warehouse, then organizes it to optimize storage management. With all of their critical data safely stored in Definite, customers can then customize the types of metrics they want to see, and the platform will combine all of that information in ways that reflect the business’s priorities.

There’s AI assistance too in the shape of Fi, a generative AI chatbot that allows users to ask questions of their data in natural language. So, users can simply command it to “show churn by cohort and channel in the last quarter,” and it will automatically fulfill that request by translating it into optimized queries, then create a handy chart that visualizes what the user wants to know. Users can then ask Fi to tweak that chart, or ask questions about it in plain English.

Alternatively, users can build their own charts using Definite’s drag-and-drop interface, allowing them to combine different metrics and datasets. Once the users have their insights, these can then be shared via live dashboards that other team members have access too, integrated in scheduled reports, or via chat and email alerts.

Perhaps the best thing about Definite is how quick it is to get all of this up and running. The company swears that users will definitely be able to see their data-based insights flowing within just half an hour of getting started, making it at least 10 times faster than stitching together traditional big data tools.

Customers will save on costs, because they’re only paying for one platform instead of three, and it also allows them to avoid hiring specialist data engineers, thanks to its heavy dose of automation. Moreover, Definite says its platform is SOC 2 Type II compliant and can scale to handle petabytes of data, all without vendor lock-in.

Definite founder and Chief Executive Mike Ritchie said he built the platform to make data analytics radically simpler. “Teams shouldn’t need six months, a half-million-dollar budget and a team of engineers to get answers about their business,” he argued. “With open-source under the hood and AI powering every interaction, we’re giving teams inquiry without the SQL queries.”

George Papadopoulos, CEO of the LinkedIn-focused lead generation platform Meet Alfred, said Definite’s platform is helping his team to simplify analytics and make smarter decisions without any of the hassles and struggles traditionally associated with data engineering. “We went from zero to data lake in a couple of hours and had a high-performance API running minutes later,” he added.

Having built out its platform and demonstrated its capabilities, Definite is now looking to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams, and that will be paid for by the funds raised today. Underscoring its ambition, Ritchie said the company is laser-focused on enterprise sales.

Costanoa Partner John Cowgill said he’s confident Definite will have a big impact soon, because he sees so many examples where companies invest millions of dollars into building modern data stacks, and that necessitates they maintain a full team of data engineers to get anything out of it.

“Definite is the answer to that pain,” he said. “It’s a powerful yet elegant solution that gives business users fast, flexible and accurate insights without the bottlenecks. [It] makes ad hoc analytics self-serve and fast without sacrificing trust or depth.”

Images: Definite