By Josh Stein, DFJ Partner
I’m really excited to announce DFJ’s latest investment in Periscope Data. We are leading the $9.5 million Series A round.
If Harry, Tom, and the Periscope team haven’t hit your radar yet, I’m delighted to introduce their amazing company to you. Periscope is the developer of an impossibly fast data analysis platform built for professional data scientists. Periscope plugs directly into databases without any ETL, copying or hassle, and is integrated with the worlds best SQL editor. With Periscope, customers run, save, and share analyses across billions of data rows in seconds — ending up with beautiful charts, graphs, dashboards, and visualizations.
A trend that DFJ has observed over the last couple of years has been the rise of the data scientist as a key role in almost all of our portfolio companies. At a software company like Box or Talkdesk, they might be analyzing customer behavior to guide the product roadmap or prioritize the sales pipeline. At Prosper, Lendkey, or AngelList, they crunch data to determine which borrowers are creditworthy and which syndicate leads should generate the best returns. At Tesla and SpaceX, data collected from a multitude of sensors are critical to the design and operation of the actual machines. Increasingly, we’re finding that nearly every company thinks of data analysis as a source of major competitive advantage and as a result, the people with the skills to do this well have been in incredible demand. People like Leon.
Meet Leon. Leon eats data for breakfast.
Leon is a data scientist who works at one of Periscope’s early customers. He’s highly trained, fluent in SQL, and is tasked with generating data-informed recommendations on critical business issues. Leon needs to crunch billions of rows of data and wants answers in seconds. And while he wants great looking charts and visuals as outputs, he doesn’t want to be distracted or limited by user interfaces that constrain what he can do. Leon wants speed, he wants power and he wants it all with a minimum of cost and hassle.
When we first met the Periscope team, one of the things that impressed us most was the degree to which they understood their core customer and the laser focus they brought to bear on building the product that the “Leons” would want. That focus has allowed them to achieve a remarkable degree of product market fit within their customer base, such that the Periscope platform has become a core part of their users’ daily workflow. Nearly 90% of customers are active on the system every day. In our diligence, we found customers with users who were using Periscope more than 1000 hours a week. That’s the kind of passionate customer engagement that makes any investor’s heart sing.
We couldn’t be more excited to be investors in Periscope Data and we see great things ahead for the company. Thank you to Harry, Tom, and the team for choosing to partner with us!
Josh Stein is a partner at DFJ
@dfjjosh
