Outlier Outsmarts Old Business Intelligence Platforms, Raises $22.1 Million Series B
These days, when we want to know if someone or something is legit, we look at the numbers. If filmmakers want discerning movie-watchers to check out their new flick, it better have a Rotten Tomatoes score with some serious juice — or Keanu Reeves dodging bullets.
Same goes for today’s business leaders. They want to know where their company is and isn’t hitting the mark, and the numbers — the data — tell the actual story. But who can possibly sift through mill/bill/trill-ions of data points crammed into Excel tables that change hourly?
🙏🏽 Thank goodness, our friends at Outlier know the pains of analysis paralysis. Along with Emergence, 11.2 Capital, First Round Capital, Homebrew, Susa Ventures, and SV Angel, we backed Outlier’s recent $22.1 million Series B — and, proud to say, led its Series A two years ago — to help deliver its automated business analysis tools to decision-makers who want insights dropped right on their doorstep, who want to pivot strategy and not deal with pivot tables.
🤩 Oakland-based Outlier AI, which has grown more than 400 percent in the past 12 months, automatically digs through large swaths of data and uncovers actionable insights, illuminating significant changes in data that would otherwise go unearthed, enabling executives to make quick, informed decisions. And, unlike business intelligence tools that cause dashboard fatigue and can take months to generate value for customers, Outlier isn’t a dashboard at all! It simply syncs with an organization’s existing data stack in minutes, identifying insights, opportunities, and unexpected data behaviors.
Enterprise prognosticators, Gartner included, all agree that AI-based and augmented analysis tools will soon reach must-have status, if they haven’t already. Looking at the differentiators, it’s hard not to place Outlier at the front of the pack. No other platform can be deployed so quickly, nor do other solutions possess the analytical granularity and algorithmic prowess to support the likes of Macy’s and other Fortune 500ers.💯💯💯
🏈🏈🏈 Having Sean Byrnes as your quarterback isn’t bad either — heck, we’d even take him over Jimmy G (almost).
Byrnes, CEO and co-founder of Outlier, is certainly a popular nominee for the Ridge founder Mount Rushmore. He co-founded Flurry in 2014 before it was acquired by Yahoo, satisfying our soft spot for repeat founders with enterprise chops that make investors and customers do the Home Alone face. Look no further than Byrnes’ Twitter feed for a firsthand look at his enterprise savvy.
💪 Then there’s fellow co-founder and CTO, Michael Kim. After receiving his PhD from UC San Francisco, he flexed his engineering muscles at Google, then became Director of Engineering at Zuckerberg-backed AltSchool. Kim’s experience and tech wizardry give Outlier a powerful 1–2 punch.
Combine Outlier’s superstar product/team and value proposition with its riper-than-ripe market fit and it’s easy to see why investors — and big customers — are ready to follow the automated insights guru to the land of milk🥛, honey🍯, and data-driven💠 efficiency.
🥳 We’re stoked to have Outlier in the Ridge Familia, and once again fund the company’s Herculean push toward simplifying the data that drives the world’s biggest business decisions.
An Outlier, indeed.✨
