Buzzy $1.95 billion startup ThoughtSpot was seeing so many customers move to Google Cloud that it's launching one of its key analytics products on it

ThoughtSpot

ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair

• On Tuesday, the $1.95 billion startup ThoughtSpot announced an expanded partnership with Google Cloud to launch its search and analytics product Embrace on BigQuery, Google Cloud's data warehouse.
• In the past year and a half, ThoughtSpot has seen more of its biggest customers move to Google Cloud, especially retailers, says Seann Gardiner, senior vice president of business development and general manager at ThoughtSpot.
• ThoughtSpot has previously said it's planning to go public, and despite the coronavirus crisis, Gardiner says ThoughtSpot is seeing a "spike" in customer usage.
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ThoughtSpot, a search analytics startup valued at $1.95 billion, is expanding its partnership with Google Cloud after seeing more of its biggest customers start using it in the past year and a half.

On Tuesday, ThoughtSpot is launching its search and analytics product, Embrace, on Google Cloud. Embrace will directly integrate with Google Cloud's data warehouse, BigQuery, allowing companies to run search and AI analytics on their data. For example, a customer could use Embrace to search its BigQuery data warehouse to find patterns that could help them improve their business, without having to move that data.

This isn't ThoughtSpot's first Google connection: It's had product integrations with Google Cloud since 2018, and cofounder and CTO Amit Prakash is a company veteran (he led multiple analytics engineering teams at the search giant for over four years until 2012). But lately, the company has been seeing more customers pick Google Cloud as either one of their clouds or their main cloud - especially large retailers, says Seann Gardiner, senior vice president of business development and general manager at ThoughtSpot.

That aligns with Google's efforts. Over the past year, Google Cloud has been building retail-focused products to improve search and uptime for customers.

"We're seeing really broad adoption [of Google Cloud] with our customers," Gardiner told Business Insider. "We're seeing customers focus on a multi-cloud approach and many customers are choosing Google as one of their clouds or their main clouds."

ThoughtSpot, which raised a massive $248 million Series E round last August, has big customers like Walmart and Hulu and recently hired its first chief financial officer Mohit Daswani to prepare for going public. For example, Hulu uses ThoughtSpot's products to measure which shows drive subscriptions and make decisions about content and growing subscribers.

'Looking to truly democratize analytics'

Gardiner says the company decided to launch Embrace on Google Cloud because it's already seeing some of its largest customers move to BigQuery. Many of its biggest customers are already using Embrace, and launching it on BigQuery gives them more options, Gardiner says. With this partnership, more customers can learn about ThoughtSpot through Google Cloud, and vice versa.

Besides Google Cloud, Embrace also currently works with the $12.4 billion data warehousing startup Snowflake and Amazon's data warehouse Redshift. Gardiner says ThoughtSpot plans to announce support for other data warehouses over time as well.

The companies currently using Embrace are "mainly large enterprise customers who are looking to truly democratize analytics and analyze more data than they've traditionally been able to," Gardiner said.

'Sometimes it takes a crisis for people to change the way they're analyzing data'

While markets have been in turmoil amid the coronavirus crisis, Gardiner says that ThoughtSpot has actually seen a "spike" in average daily usage among its current customers.

"They need to do more analytics to be able to deal with the potential impact, and there's new modeling they tend to do around their data, and they need smarter work and more of it," Gardiner said. ThoughtSpot is simultaneously seeing current customers ramp up their product usage more quickly than usual and signing on new customers at a faster rate than usual. "We see this accelerate deals in some cases."

Similarly, Gardiner says that Embrace offers a faster way for customers to analyze data.

"When the world is changing daily, you need to make decisions quickly and you need to make decisions against all the data quickly," Gardiner said. "With coronavirus, it's all about accelerating insights. Sometimes it takes a crisis for people to change the way they're analyzing data. That's why we're seeing ThoughtSpot be adopted."

Gardiner says that in the near term, ThoughtSpot will continue improving its AI features and making its products easier for customers to use.

"Many enterprise software companies don't make their platforms easy enough to engage with," Gardiner said. "The mission is to drive that ease of use into the platform and drive that engagement very naturally with our clients."

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