Looker

Overview

Looker is a data analytics and business intelligence startup.  Their software is used for exploring data and making decisions for everything from marketing, sales, operations, logistics, web, etc.  It is able to pull and digest data in real time from numerous sources including Salesforce, Slack, SQL, Hadoop, web APIs and produce a number of dashboard visualizations and analytics. 

Looker's business model is a standard SaaS subscription model.

The team is based in the San Francisco bay area.

Why I like Them

Companies currently are flooded with data in the "Big Data Age" but understanding that data and being able to use it to make better decisions is something many firm's struggle with.  Today, to make any sort of headway with their data, specialist data scientists with years of advanced education and expertise in tools like SQL, R, etc. are needed.  However, every job function in a company needs to be able to quickly analyze and make decisions off this data without going through the bottleneck of a limited number of data scientists.  Looker provides this ability to every person in the company without the bottleneck and without needing advanced training to use and analyze this data.  In our data driven age this is a critical ability and it's easy to see Looker becoming a standard tool utilized across every levels of a company just like Microsoft Office Suite.

Despite how crowded the Business Intelligence space is, Looker has a lot of tractionI at over 1,000 paying customers and more than 50,000 users.  These include some large names such as Square, IBM, WeWork, Nordstrom, and Amazon. 

Disclosure:  All information is from publicly available sources, I have not had any contact with a member of the company or its investors.

Slantrange

Overview

Slantrange is a big data and analytics company focused on the agriculture sector that describes itself as an agricultural intelligence company.  They offer a SaaS analytical product for agriculture and advanced multi-spectral sensor systems meant to be mounted on drones.  Applications of their systems include detecting crop infections, vegetation stress, automatic crop counts, etc. 

Slantrange products are mostly sold to drone services companies who are then contracted by farmers for data analysis of their fields.  They make revenue through their SaaS software subscriptions and through selling the hardware sensors.

The team is based in San Diego, California and currently has approximately a dozen employees.

Why I like Them

There is a large opportunity ahead in digitizing agriculture and Slantrange is the premium provider of data analytics for the industry with best in class sensors.  Satellite systems cannot provide the resolution or yield of information on crop fields that drone based sensors systems do.  Slantrange takes advantage of this much richer data set using advanced data mining and analytics to offer detailed, actionable insights to farmers.  I like that the team's focus is on continuously extracting higher value data from sensor systems that no other offering can match.

Even with such a small team they already have a huge amount of traction selling in 20+ countries via 15+ distributors.  They also have a large amount of intellectual property around technology.

Disclosure:  I have spoken to members of the executive team.