Thoughtspot, a Palo Alto-based company that provides search-driven analytics for enterprises, plans to double its headcount in India as it looks to strengthen its presence in the country.
Thoughtspot, which counts Khosla Ventures and Lightspeed among its investors, had forayed into India in July last year by opening an engineering center in Bengaluru. This was the company’s first center in the Asia Pacific region and third center across the world.
“We plan to invest $10 million in R&D in India to accelerate cloud development. We will probably end this year with around 40-50 people in Bengaluru team and double it next year. My aim is to get to at least 100 people by late next year” Prince Kohli, Global SVP – Engineering at Thoughtspot told ETtech.
Founded in 2012, Thoughtspot brings a simple Google-like search bar functionality to data for enterprise customers enabling them to make the right decisions.
It uses natural language processing to interpret what the customer is asking for and start showing up the results in real-time along with visualising multiple data sources in an interactive manner.
“Once we learn what areas you are interested in, we will ask thousands of questions on your behalf in the background and provide insights from that area when you come to the dashboard. We will also provide insights in areas which you might not have looking right now” Kohli said.
However, Kohli notes that they are not building a prediction engine, rather they provide all the elements that will allow customers to build a prediction engine. “We will show correlation and try to not imply causation, since our results always have to be accurate”
It currently supports Amazon Web Services and on-premise setups but plans to shortly extend support to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
For customers, Thoughtspot primarily focuses on large enterprises, “like the top 5000 companies in the world”. Among sectors, retail is the largest sector, within which they have different verticals like sales, finance and HR vertical. Some of its clients include Amway, British Telecom, De Beers, Bed Bath & Beyond, Capital One, Chevron, and Scotiabank.
“Some of the pure technology companies also use us for their engineering functions, to understand how quality is trending and why is it trending up or down, how issues are trending, how their vendor issues correlate to their issues” Kohli said.
Free trial instance later this year
That said, Thoughtspot also plans to launch an open instance on its website later this year, that will connect to all the public databases and allow users to explore the product.
“The way we usually grow is that we show people what can be done with a simple demo with their own data. Once a customer buys us, the scope automatically expands because the usage is so simple, that they want to go away from their previous tools which are unwieldy and not real time.” he added.
In terms of monetisation, Thoughtspot was previously offering its services through a perennial license to customers, but a few quarters back, it moved to an annual subscription model and will have a “SaaS model very soon”.