Pecan AI closed a $35 million Series B after a year and a half of aggressive growth spurred on in part by the pandemic.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

The round was led by GGV Capital and included participation from Vintage and existing investors Dell Technologies Capital, S-Capital and Mindset. The company has now raised more than $50 million in funding since being founded in 2018.

The company — which is based in Tel Aviv pending a move soon to New York — helps its clients integrate AI into their business intelligence data and analytics, unlocking more predictive insights and information, said co-founder and CEO Zohar Bronfman. The platform is designed for business intelligence analysts, allowing more people in an organization to use it and the AI-driven information it provides.

Pecan AI’s platform mainly has been used by retailers, makers of consumer products and mobile application developers to understand consumer behavior. The recent pandemic made getting those insights even more important as business patterns were thrown into flux, Bronfman siad.

“With the pandemic, it’s shown you can’t just rely on historical data,” he said.

Next-gen BI

Oren Yunger, Investor at GGV Capital, said investing in a platform that brings AI to analysts was an easy decision as every company is now moving from being data informed to data driven.

“You need to enable the folks who have that data to leverage that data,” he said.

The 50-person company was not actually fundraising when Yunger started to talk to Bronfman about three months ago to take on an investment to accelerate the growth. With the new money in hand, the 50-person company plans on doubling its headcount in the next year and investing in its platform, Bronfman said.

Bronfman said he sees Pecan AI as the next generation of business intelligence. Just as Tableau and Qlik changed the BI world more than a decade ago, Pecan AI is seeking to do the same. While others like Boston-based DataRobot bring AI to the process, it is designed for a smaller sect of data scientists, Bronfman said.

Yunger said the success of Tableau and DataRobot — which landed a $2.7 billion valuation last year — show the market that is open to Pecan AI.

“There are changes in collecting data, there are changes in analysing data,” he said. “Data is taking over the world.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.