As data access becomes increasingly tied to business success, making data available to all business users, no matter their data processing skills, becomes increasingly essential. The founders of seama young startup, experienced firsthand the necessity to make data more accessible at Okta and decided to create an organization to resolve this problem, particularly because it pertains to customer data.
On Tuesday, they announced that they were committing $5 million in seed funding to make their vision a reality and that they might be releasing the product to the general public for the primary time.
“We are constructing what we call the AI interface for customer information. And our mission is actually to present everyone, no matter their technical skills, the so-called business users, the ability to make use of data to reply their questions,” Nicholas Scavone, the corporate’s CEO and co-founder, told TechCrunch.
This is completed through a generative AI prompt interface that enables people to ask questions on customer data and get answers without understanding SQL queries. “Our solution to this is definitely to construct some sort of end-to-end system that offers you a straightforward chat interface where you’ll be able to discuss your data in natural language, particularly across the sales and marketing systems,” he said.
The problem with current systems is that to tug information out of your data warehouse – Seam relies on Snowflake – you wish SQL knowledge, which creates problems for many business users and forces them to show to an information analyst to do the work to acquire information they need for his or her work. Generative AI systems provide the flexibility to robotically convert a straightforward voice query into SQL code and return a solution. He says he and his co-founders realized this skill was a business opportunity.
“Whenever you see friction like this in a business process, you understand that there may be a chance, and this discovery got here at exactly the appropriate time with this shift in AI technology. Suddenly it was possible to resolve this problem with natural language while not having SQL knowledge,” he said.
They founded the corporate in March 2023 and spent a yr constructing it. It took a protracted time to construct, attempting to simplify something incredibly complex that a whole team at Okta was fighting. “I feel it took so long because we had to construct an incredible amount of information infrastructure. We needed to integrate greater than 20 applications. We needed to make certain pipelines may very well be created with one click,” he said. And it was lots of work to automate what previously required lots of highly expert people.
They now need to expand their market with the joint product. “We’re starting to essentially scale. Our platform is powerful, production-ready, and we work with some great corporations. So that’s how I’d see our future,” he said.
The $5 million seed investment was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Colle Capital, F7 Ventures, Ritual Capital and Umami Capital. The company also received investments from quite a lot of industry angels.
