Making Business Insights as Easy as a Google Search

In recent years, there has been considerable innovation in the ways that data is stored, moved, and analyzed, with the rise of companies like Snowflake and Databricks, Chris notes. The Sands Capital team knew that innovation was starting to occur in the value chain that extends from the central data warehouses all the way up to the business teams that “consume” the data in departments outside of an organization’s technology or analytics groups. We believed that Tellius could play an important role in that value chain.

Legacy business intelligence products were typically applications downloaded onto a user’s desktop. “That was okay in the days when you might have thousands of lines of data in an Excel spreadsheet,” Chris says. With the advent of big data, the picture changed entirely. “Today, there might be millions or even billions of rows of data that need to be analyzed,” he says. Data storage had also moved to the cloud, and the constantly evolving capabilities of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model were needed to handle the massive amounts of cloud-based data.

Ajay uses a traditional infrastructure example to explain his vision for the role Tellius plays in the data value chain. “Companies like Snowflake that made massive amounts of data easily accessible on the cloud have effectively built a large ‘water tank’ for the community,” he says. “We knew the next challenge would be to ‘lay the last mile.’ We wanted to build a product that could make the data available, in an easily usable way, to all the homes, which in this case means all the business departments outside of IT that need access to it.”

He admits, “It was a bold, and perhaps audacious, mission because we knew our firm might be taking on the likes of Microsoft, AWS [Amazon Web Services], and Salesforce.” Still, he was confident that he and the team at Tellius could address a need he didn’t think was fully served yet.

Google-like Search Capabilities

The key to delivering an easy-to-use interface, Ajay says, was to provide Google-like search capabilities, enabling people to pose questions using conversational language. Ajay wanted to also make it possible for business users who didn’t know SQL to use conversational language to query a database. As he explains, with Tellius, a customer’s brand managers don’t need to know how to write code to access revenue numbers in their company’s database. Instead, they can simply ask, “What happened with the sales of electronic products in California last week?” Tellius doesn’t just deliver the answer. It also pulls the relevant data into an easy-to-read chart that the brand manager can take to their next meeting.

Using machine learning and predictive analytics, Tellius can also identify the patterns in users’ searches and then scour the database to draw information the user might not yet know they need or want. “In the same way Google recognizes our frequent search topics and serves up related information, we wanted to deliver insights from all the data that users might not know is there for them,” says Ajay. “We’re moving beyond enabling users to pull information from a database. We can now push relevant insights to them, as well.”

Chris believes the search capabilities of Tellius are one of its true differentiators. “The legacy business intelligence applications were very good at answering ‘what’ questions, like ‘What was our firm’s sales in the Southeast region last year?’ but they weren’t really capable of answering the deeper ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions like, ‘How did our revenue by various product types change over the past year?’ or ‘Why did our revenue decline by 10% in the Southeast over the past two quarters?’”

He says Tellius is capable of examining a company’s analytical data and deriving root cause analysis, key drivers, and underlying trends that might be driving a certain outcome. In the example of a region that experienced a revenue decline, for instance, Tellius might surface insights that point toward a drop in the generation of prospective customer leads or fewer promotional emails as key contributing factors or drivers. In the past, that type of analysis had to be done manually and could take a team of data analysts weeks to conduct, depending on their bandwidth and the priority of the request.

Need Spans Multiple Industries

The path from identifying this customer need to building a solution for it was not a direct line, Ajay admits. He graduated from college in India with an engineering degree in the early nineties. It was before the internet had gained widespread use. His first job was with an Indian telecom company, and he earned $100 a month, a livable wage in India at that time. He says he couldn’t have even imagined the possibility of becoming a technology entrepreneur because the groundwork for what the industry would become was just being laid. Earlier in his career, his work had focused on helping telecom companies analyze the data they had on customers, like when service was interrupted and the locations of calls. As he notes, an important step in the evolution of data analysis came with the release of the first iPhone. Smartphones massively increased the amount of data that could be analyzed. Increasingly sophisticated algorithms also greatly enhanced the possibilities for scanning and pulling relevant insights from all that data.

Ajay co-founded a startup, Celcite, that catered to the telecom industry. It started small, as a services-based business, because he and his partner didn’t yet have the funding to build a product. But success came quickly. They were eventually able to build a platform to automate analysis process of telecom data, and their business was growing rapidly when the company was acquired by Amdocs.

Ajay knew that telecommunications wasn’t the only sector that needed help making sense of Big Data. He founded Tellius because he wanted to serve a broad array of industries. In line with that goal, he derived the name of the company from the Latin word for Earth, which is tellus. As someone who understands the importance of good search protocols, he added the “i” in the name to make it unique.

Finding the Right Product Market Fit

Ajay understood that finding the right technology to serve a pressing customer need is not an easy process. “Many companies struggle with getting the right product/market fit,” says Ajay. Some companies get excited by what seems to be a uniquely smart technology but later discover it isn’t feasible for everyday users. Other companies struggle from the other side. “They have a really good understanding of a customer pain point, but they can’t find an affordable way to build a technology that will address it,” he says. “Money and resources are finite, and you can exhaust both before finding the right product/market fit. At a startup, it’s often a race against time.”

Even determining when a promising technology is truly solving a pressing customer need can be a challenge. “We had points along the way when things did get very foggy for us. We had good feedback from users, but there’s always the question of what volume of users having positive experiences is enough and how much time and resources you can commit to iterations that address the suggestions you get for adding features.”

Sands Capital entered the picture with Tellius in late 2020. When the Sands Capital team spoke with Tellius’ customers as part of our due diligence, it became clear that Tellius was offering a breakthrough innovation.

“Many customers told us that their time to develop insights and analytics had been cut down from weeks to hours, and sometimes even minutes,” says Chris. “Frankly, when you hear from people at large, sophisticated enterprises that have big budgets for data initiatives and sizable teams of data analysts make comments like ‘This capability is super valuable to us and is saving us tons of time,’ our ears perk up. That’s what they were telling us about Tellius.”