Scoop Analytics, a business analytics tool powered entirely by spreadsheets, announced today it has raised $3.5 million in seed funding. Scoop will use the new funding round to expand the features of its solution – which is 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 with slide presentations based on live and drillable data to advance their business.
Ridge Ventures led the funding round, which included returning investors Engineering Capital and Industry Ventures. Ridge Ventures partner Yousuf Khan, a former CIO who has advised early-stage companies such as Material Security, Productiv, and Zoom, is joining Scoop’s board.
Scoop was built by veterans in the business analytics space and Scoop CEO Brad Peters started his career using spreadsheets as a financial analyst at Morgan Stanley. Then he went to HBS and later led the analytics product at Siebel, which became the basis of Oracle Business Intelligence after the acquisition. He utilized his knowledge of business intelligence and data systems to start Birst in 2005, introducing an idea that was entirely new at the time.
Peters kept in touch with his team from Birst – who had also lived first-hand the problems with the conventional data stack. And 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 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.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. 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.”
- Brad Peters, founder and CEO of Scoop
“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. 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.”
- Yousuf Khan
