Mark Hay and Ethan Ding have a vision to make data the basis of every corporate decision. Bold? Definitely. But the two engineers, who met during the pandemic a few years ago, are full of optimism.
Hay and Ding are the co-founders of TextQL, a platform that links a company’s data stack to large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4. They say their idea is to let business teams ask their data questions whenever they want, using tools that — as Hay puts it — “know their teams’ ‘nouns’ and semantics.”
“Data leaders have been fooled for 15 years … Half the Fortune 500 chief data officers hate the word ‘self service’ by now,” Hay, TextQL’s CTO, told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Their 400,000 data scientists are wasting 40% or more of their time on one-off data requests, and their business teams are using words that mean different things in their databases, causing months of lost productivity fighting over numbers.”
Hay, who used to be an engineer on Facebook’s machine learning team, and Ding, a former member of Bessemer Venture Partners’ data team (and a lover of gardening metaphors), thought they could make a better solution.
In 2022, they started TextQL, which uses a data model to match a company’s database to the “nouns” that describe a customer’s business in their language — for example, words like “order,” “item,” “dealer,” “SKU,” “inventory” and so on.
TextQL connects to business intelligence tools and shows users existing dashboards when a question has been asked before. It can also use documentation from enterprise data catalogs like Alation1, Hay says, and notes in platforms like Confluence or Google Drive.
This lets TextQL users ask a chatbot questions like “Can you show me a list of orders that were very late?” and “Calculate the distribution centers with the highest concentration?” TextQL can also do some things beyond answering questions, like sending an email to managers about some data.
Hay said “We can give enterprise operators superpowers in one platform, in an economic environment where everyone’s trying to do more with less.”
Hay — who thinks TextQL competes with vendors like Palantir and C3.ai — says that TextQL has six customers in healthcare, bio and life sciences, financial services, manufacturing and media right now. He says annual recurring revenue is in the “six figures,” which gives TextQL “several years” of runway.
Hay said “The slowdown hasn’t hurt us much, if at all — companies are happy about our software because it can help them do more with less people.” He said “Our whole team is made of veteran founders who had venture backing before — which is talent that’d be pretty hard to find outside of this environment.”
TextQL, which has a team of about 10 people, has raised $4.1 million in pre-seed and seed round co-led by Neo and DCM with help from Unshackled Ventures, Worklife Ventures, PageOne Ventures, FirstHand Ventures and Indicator Fund.