Scoop Analytics, the business analytics tool powered entirely by spreadsheets, today announced it has raised $3.5 million in seed funding. Scoop will use the new funds to expand the features of its solution – the first ever to make it easy for anyone with spreadsheet skills to get data from any application, blend data from different sources and tell visually compelling data stories through slide presentations based on live, drillable data to advance their business.
The round was led by Ridge Ventures, with participation from Industry Ventures and returning investor Engineering Capital. Ridge Ventures partner Yousuf Khan is joining Scoop’s board. Khan is a former CIO and has been an advisor to early-stage companies such as Material Security, Productiv and Zoom.
“With the support and added expertise of these partners, Scoop is strongly positioned to eliminate the wasted time and money companies spend preparing data for business analytics and take our work to empower operations teams in finance, marketing and revenue to the next level,” said Brad Peters, founder and CEO of Scoop. “Companies traditionally had to make large investments and spend months setting up data warehouses just to give businesspeople ‘self-service’ data analytics capabilities that were ultimately very limited. It was incredibly painful. Scoop now makes it extremely easy for anyone with spreadsheet skills to access, combine and use data to bring data stories to life in a way that is repeatable and automated – and they can do it all without a six-figure minimum commitment or the involvement of a data team.”
“Scoop’s mission to deliver data analytics in a form factor that doesn’t require a data team is making the dream of self-service business intelligence a reality,” said Khan. “Ridge Ventures is excited to partner with Scoop and its amazing founders Brad, Janet and Gabe to advance this unique approach and make companies stronger.”
Scoop was built by veterans in the business analytics space. Peters began his career using spreadsheets as a financial analyst at Morgan Stanley. He then went to HBS and later led the analytics product at Siebel, which became the basis of Oracle Business Intelligence after the acquisition. He leveraged his knowledge of business intelligence and data systems to start Birst in 2005, introducing an idea that was entirely new at the time – that data-driven decisions should happen every day. That’s why Gartner, Forrester and others considered Birst, which made sophisticated analytics accessible to a much broader audience, a revolutionary product. Before that, it was extremely complicated and labor-intensive for companies to use data to make strategic decisions. It took millions of dollars and years before those organizations could realize any business value. In 2017, Peters sold Birst to Infor, but he still recognized that the audience for these tools was limited. Most businesses are smaller and younger. They are not large enterprises with big data teams to build reporting for every business need. They just want to be able to leverage their data to make strategic decisions that move their businesses forward.
Peters kept in touch with his team from Birst, who had also lived first-hand the problems with the conventional data stack. Scoop co-founder and CTO Gabe Jakobson previously led the visualization team at Birst, where he saw what people could do, but didn’t have the time for, with the Birst product. Scoop co-founder and Head of Customer Janet Gehrmann previously led SMB go-to-market at Birst, where she heard from hundreds of potential customers with analytics needs who couldn’t get the resources needed from their BI teams to implement the solution.
These customer pain points sparked the idea for Scoop Analytics, which is built on the innovative idea that data-driven decisions can and should happen every day – for everyone in an organization. People shouldn’t have to be engineers, or need to rely on them, just to get access to and value from their data. Scoop represents a new approach, one that doesn’t require technical setup or data infrastructure. All Scoop users need is the ability to use a spreadsheet.
“Everyone from line-of-business leaders to CEOs should be able to solve problems with the most complete and current data available, but that hasn’t been possible until now,” said Scott Whitaker, head of finance, Codesmith. “Scoop allows our operations teams and execs to immediately work with any data in our business using only the spreadsheet skills they already have and without requiring any work by a data team to set up any infrastructure first. It does the whole job.”
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