65% of Americans are expected to shop online in 2023. Yet, less than 2% of online visits result in a completed transaction. That’s a lot of visits that go without conversions. Commerce brands are collecting troves of data with the hopes of better understanding their customers’ behaviors to improve engagement, demand forecast, and drive sales. Zenlytic is a platform that unifies business intelligence and product analytics for commerce brands, irrespective of the source of data, allowing teams to get the answers they seek with natural language queries; without needing to rely on SQL. Most tools in the space are able to provide the what (eg why did the Average Order Value fall last Tuesday?) but Zenlytic is built to provide you the why as well, yielding critical insight. Serving as a single source of truth, the platform is robust enough to also handle the needs of more sophisticated data professionals to help them address their team’s data requests efficiently. Large brands have long relied on data warehouses and specialized data teams to optimize their commerce businesses; Zenlytic makes similar capabilities available to all brands without significant investment in terms of both time and cost.
AlleyWatch caught up with Zenlytic CEO and Cofounder Ryan Janssen to learn more about the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We raised a $4.4M seed round, bringing our total funding to $5.4M after our $1M pre-seed (which actually broke on AlleyWatch!)
Investors this round were Bain Capital Ventures, who led the round, Red Antler’s Habitat fund, the Sequoia Scout Fund, and our existing investors.
Tell us about the product or service that Zenlytic offers.
Zenlytic is a tool for commerce brands that unifies business intelligence and product analytics into a simple natural-language interface.
The tool helps brands make all the important decisions – building efficient acquisition funnels, finding leading indicators of churn, optimizing CAC, and ROAS.
What inspired the start of Zenlytic?
My cofounder Paul and I started a data science consultancy during grad school. We grew this to the point that we realized that there needs to be a better tool for self-serve data consumption.
Over the past few years, there’s been a quiet revolution in data pipelines – now brands of all sizes can use the same data stack as leading enterprise companies. Except business intelligence hasn’t kept up – if you can’t speak SQL or python, it’s hard to make sense of a modern data warehouse.
How is Zenlytic different?
Zenlytic is different because it’s enterprise-grade. There are plenty of ‘dashboards-in-a-can’ Shopify apps out there, which give quick reporting but no customization. As a result, the reporting is never QUITE accurate, and a bunch of manual work happens in Gsheets.
Zenlytic is customized to each business. Which means the metrics and dashboards are tailored to your business. Now, you can use the same stack as the world’s largest DTC brands.
What market does Zenlytic target and how big is it?
Our market is any commerce business over $10M in GMV. It’s big.
What’s your business model?
We’re a SaaS business. We charge a monthly fee for a turnkey experience – which means we’ll host Zenlytic and do everything to make sure a company can go from ‘zero’ to ‘data-driven.’
We’re a SaaS business. We charge a monthly fee for a turnkey experience – which means we’ll host Zenlytic and do everything to make sure a company can go from ‘zero’ to ‘data-driven.’
We’ve also open-sourced a lot of our code, including our data visualization library and our core metrics layer. We want to give back to the data community!
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?
We’re not really changing our plans much. Business intelligence is an essential tool; if your plane is losing altitude, the last thing you want to do is turn off your instruments!
What was the funding process like?
We were nervous going into the fundraise; this was the worst VC market in a long time. Fortunately, we were able to get a great outcome faster than we were preparing for.
We were able to do this because we had done our homework. We were checking in with investors for months leading into the fundraise. ‘Lines, not dots’ is real (and powerful) – when we switched into actual fundraising mode we had several investors who had been tracking our progress.
Several investors leaned in, and we enthusiastically chose Bain Cap as our lead. They’re total pros, the deal closed quickly and collaboratively, and they’ve been valued partners ever since!
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
The hardest part of most things is starting. It takes some guts to go in and start fundraising in a catastrophic VC market. But once we took the leap, things moved ahead quickly.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
I don’t know the exact answer to this question; but I think our investors share our belief that business intelligence is due for a reboot.
In the past few years, technical data analysts have gotten a wealth of new tools for making sense of their businesses. However, non-technical employees are still refreshing the same broken dashboards.
We’re due for a better way, and everyone on Team Zenlytic is excited to build it.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We plan to expand the team a bit. Amazingly, we were just four hard-working people when the seed round happened. We’ve already doubled in size and I suspect we’ll roughly triple.
Apart from that, our main milestone is to provide a really amazing experience for our users. Scale isn’t on the road map right now. This is a far more complex tool than most SaaS CRUD apps, and we’re just staying focused on engineering excellence.
our main milestone is to provide a really amazing experience for our users. Scale isn’t on the road map right now. This is a far more complex tool than most SaaS CRUD apps, and we’re just staying focused on engineering excellence.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Every ‘RIP good times’ or ‘Yay good times’ blog post is trying to cater to every startup. But every startup has different needs, different resources, and different strengths.
So, ignore the canned advice. Don’t be a trend-chaser, and don’t be a contrarian. Find a strategy that fits your business.
What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
Last time I said Katz’. I’ll still say Katz’ today. I’ll probably be saying Katz’ for another 141 years (or if not me, definitely my AI chatbot)!
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- Source: https://www.alleywatch.com/2022/12/zenlytic-business-intelligence-product-analytics-platform-e-commerce-brands-ryan-janssen/
