Mark Hay and Ethan Ding, former engineers with backgrounds at Facebook and Bessemer Venture Partners, are on a mission to transform corporate decision-making into a data-driven process. Together, they co-founded TextQL, an innovative platform that seamlessly integrates a company’s existing data stack with advanced language models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4.
TextQL’s primary goal is to empower business teams to interact with their data in a more intuitive and efficient manner. The platform, as described by Hay, “understands their teams’ ‘nouns’ and semantics,” providing a user-friendly experience for extracting valuable insights from complex datasets.
In an email interview with TechCrunch, Hay, serving as TextQL’s CTO, expressed frustration with the challenges faced by data leaders and chief data officers in adopting self-service data analytics tools. According to him, many Fortune 500 companies struggle with data scientists spending a significant portion of their time on one-off data requests, resulting in lost productivity and communication gaps between business teams.
TextQL, launched in 2022, addresses these challenges by using a sophisticated data model to map a company’s database to key business terms, or “nouns,” such as “order,” “item,” “dealer,” “SKU,” and “inventory.” The platform seamlessly integrates with business intelligence tools, directs users to existing dashboards, and references documentation from enterprise data catalogs and collaboration platforms like Alation, Confluence, and Google Drive.
Users can pose questions to TextQL’s chatbot, seeking insights like “Can you show me a list of orders that were very late?” or “Calculate the distribution centers with the highest concentration?” The platform goes beyond mere data retrieval; through its automation component, TextQL can execute actions, such as sending email notifications to managers based on specified data conditions.
TextQL currently boasts half a dozen customers across various industries, including healthcare, bio and life sciences, financial services, manufacturing, and media. Hay sees TextQL competing with established vendors like Palantir and C3.ai. Despite economic challenges, TextQL’s annual recurring revenue is in the “six figures,” providing the company with “several years” of runway.
Venture-backed by Neo and DCM, TextQL has raised $4.1 million in pre-seed and seed funding rounds. The investment, led by Neo and DCM, includes participation from Unshackled Ventures, Worklife Ventures, PageOne Ventures, FirstHand Ventures, and Indicator Fund. With a team of around 10 people, TextQL is well-positioned to continue its mission of providing enterprise operators with powerful data-driven solutions in a rapidly evolving business landscape.
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