Employees at many companies today are expected to make decisions through careful data analysis, but the tools they need to do it are clunky, slow or — in some cases — don’t exist.
That’s according to Colin Zima, the CEO of Omni, a business intelligence (BI) platform that aims to help organizations simplify how they work with their data. Before co-founding Omni, Zima led the Search quality team at Google and was the chief analytics officer at Looker.
“With cloud data warehouses like Snowflake and BigQuery, legacy reliability is merging with modern scalability,” Zima told Tech Zone Daily. “Yet tens of thousands of businesses remain tied to outdated BI processes. Modern organizations demand the agility of self-service analytics without compromising centralized control. That gap represents a massive market opportunity — it’s why Omni was born.”
Omni’s platform lets users run ad-hoc data analyses and build charts and reports, and also provides tools to create visualizations with components such as hyperlinks, text, and images.
In addition to a point-and-click interface for creating data queries and dashboards, Omni offers a compatibility layer for Excel spreadsheets and formulas. It can also take raw SQL, the language used to communicate with databases, and automatically parse and restructure it into “modeled concepts” that then become accessible in Omni’s interface.
Products built with Omni, like dashboards, can be brought into other applications via integrations, Zima added.
“We built Omni to embrace the diversity of things you need to do with BI,” he said. “It’s simple enough for anyone to get started quickly with exploration and dashboards, but flexible enough to handle deep customization and sophisticated data models as your needs evolve.”
While there’s no shortage of BI tools on the market today, Omni has managed to grow its customer base to over 200 companies, including Perplexity, BuzzFeed, Writer, and Incident.io. Annual recurring revenue has grown to nearly $10 million, Zima said, and he expects that number to triple this year.
Investors are eager to get in on the action, Zima said, which led Omni to raise sooner than was “strictly necessary.” This month, the company closed a $69 million Series B round that was led by ICONIQ Growth, and saw participation from Theory Ventures, First Round Capital, Redpoint Ventures, GV, and Snowflake Ventures.
“We’ve seen other companies raise — and burn through — hundreds of millions [of dollars] trying to brute-force growth,” Zima said. “That’s not how we operate. Building everything you need in a BI tool is expensive because we’re competing with every major BI tool from the last 40 years. Our growth has been efficient and intentional, allowing us to focus on R&D.”
Zima said the funding, which brings San Francisco-based Omni’s total raised to $97 million at a $650 million valuation, will help Omni keep the “foot on the gas” around embedded analytics and spreadsheet functionality, and allow it to “double down” on hiring across its product and go-to-market teams. Omni currently has 85 employees, and expects to end the year with 150.
“We want to be well-funded and control our own destiny,” Zima said. “When an [exit] derails a company’s mission, product development slows, customer experience suffers, and the magic fades […] Our strategy has been to fund aggressively but spend thoughtfully, so we can stay focused on the product without worrying about runway. Our past successes have also put us in a strong position to think long-term.”
