AI-based action detection: never miss a metric that matters

Why we invested in Baresquare

The decision-making of most companies today heavily depends on data. Despite the need for actionable insights, oftentimes the data available is too static, complex and scattered across various tools. This leads to data blind spots, lost insights and missed action.

Most companies these days have traditional tracking and monitoring tools in place (e.g.Tableau, FullStory), which often fall short in the following areas:

1. Analyzing large data sets & deriving conclusions in real-time. Enormous datasets generated from various data sources often require additional specialised personnel such as data scientists in order to extract relevant insights and derive the right conclusions. This increases the time and money necessary to gain actionable insights from large data sets.
2. Unstructured dashboards. Data from monitoring tools often portray output data on hard to grasp dashboards which can only be understood by technical employees. Hence, highly relevant insights might get lost in translation.
3. No clear responsibilities. If relevant issues are reported in the data, the lead time to identify the responsible department that can fix the issue still remains too long. Such time lags can often be very costly for companies, especially if the data anomaly has a large impact on the top line.

Meet Baresquare. The company addresses such jobs by enabling users to turn time-series data into action at scale by triggering relevant prompts to the right teams, in real-time.

The product can be divided into a workflow of three jobs to be done:

1. Action detection brings together a number of features that uncover relevant anomalies within data sets, at speed and at scale. Typical data sources that are used today include Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics and Google Big Query.
2. Smart workflows provide features that speed up cross-enterprise collaboration on actions with the most impact. Data analysts are also able to monitor action progression for processes that have already been defined, as well as identifying emerging, dynamic processes. This allows for smart prioritisation within teams.
3. Action Triggering. Action triggering offers a solution that learns as it scales, enabling data analysts to approve or amend actions before being passed on to the respective teams. The triggering engine, thus, adapts to each customer’s needs over time.

Those features allow customers to identify early technical issues that for instance harm the conversion flow on a website. Automated notifications enable customers to move fast and detect the issue right away. In addition, Baresquare translates the triggered notifications into actionable business language, so every department, technical or not, can understand the issue at hand. Moreover, the tickets that are created are prioritised based on business impact, with the strategic or financial objective of each company in mind. The action-triggering engine also learns over time, such that it will result in increased efficiency at scale. Based on a calculation by Baresquare, the software generates an ROI of more than 5x within the first 2 months of deployment.

The company was founded in 2017 by Georgios Grigoriadis. It builds on the previous experience the team has gained with its marketing analytics consultancy, which was originally founded in 2010 in Greece. The founder Georgios is a true visionary who also understands the technical depth of the product, in addition to having gained experience at SONY (one of Baresquare’s flagship customers) as a data analyst. Lars Boeddener joined the team as a COO in 2019. He previously spent more than 14 years at SONY in his capacity as Product Owner, in addition to 3 years as a Director at Adidas. With his experience at Adidas and SONY, Lars has gained first-hand experience of the pain points present within eCommerce and direct-to-consumer brands.

The Baresquare team

Over our various conversations with the team, we were particularly impressed by their profound understanding with regard to the product and the target market. Not only does Georgios possess excellent founder-market-fit through his valuable experience in the field as an analytics consultant, but he is further joined by a very strong executive team that complements him in function and skillset. We are of the strong view that, above all, Baresquare is tackling a large problem that every company with an online presence encounters. With the rapid growth of the overall analytics market, Baresquare is addressing an enormous market. Customers like SONY, Dixon’s Carphone and Cooperative Bank have already expressed the strong value they see in the product.

btov Partners is proud to lead Baresquare’s USD 2.5m Seed funding round. We are joined by a group of btov Angels, including Max Burger, Ijad Madisch, Daniel Glinz, Florian Rahmann, Beate Fastrich, Christian Twardawa, Michael Dengler, Reiner Mauch, Peter Udo Diehl and Frank Koydl as well as Kostas Tzoumas, who previously founded Ververica (formerly dataArtisans).

Our investment in Baresquare marks an important milestone for btov, for two reasons: 1) Baresquare is the first company that btov invested in where the majority of its team is based in Greece, with its headquarters in the UK. 2) Baresquare was introduced to us by Kostas Tzoumas, the founder of Data Artisans (now Ververica), which was acquired by Alibaba in late 2018. The fact that Kostas is also investing as a co-investor in this round is not only a testament to the technological superiority of the solution but also evidence that the cycle closes with Baresquare. In a conversation with btov, Kostas mentioned that Baresquare is the “platform that continues where Ververica stops”.

​​For the btov Partners team,

Florian Schweitzer, Andreas Göldi and Ben Dobbrick