Venture-backed startup Redbird Software Inc. today launched an analytics platform, also called Redbird, that uses artificial intelligence to help companies find useful patterns in their data.
The product milestone comes about two years after the company closed a $7.6 million seed round backed by Y Combinator. Redbird says that it has tripled its headcount since the investment. In the same time frame, it amassed a customer base that includes enterprises such as Mondelez International Inc. and Google LLC.
Redbird positions its platform as an alternative to established business intelligence tools such as Tableau. The platform includes AI features that enable workers to analyze business data using natural language prompts. According to Redbird, its ChatGPT-like interface removes the need for the specialized technical know-how that is necessary to use some competing tools.
“Truly self-serve analytics has fallen short for organizations, with the reality instead being complex data pipelines, dashboards and shadow analytics that require technical skills to execute,” said Redbird Chief Executive Officer Erin Tavgac (pictured, right, with co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Deren Tavgac.)
The company ships its platform with connectors for popular cloud applications such as Salesforce. Databricks, SimilarWeb and a number of other analytics tools are supported as well. Companies can use Redbird’s connectors to automate the task of pulling data into its analytics platform for processing.
Once the raw data has been streamed into the software, analysts can search for erroneous records and remove them. A user could, for example, delete sales records that appear more than once in a dataset. Such duplicate items can emerge when two of the applications from which a company streams information into Redbird store separate versions of the same file.
After removing errors from a dataset, analysts can standardize it into a common format to ease analysis. Different business records are often stored in different ways: Some of a company’s sales logs might specify the time of day when the transaction was completed, while others may lack that information. Removing such formatting differences makes it easier for analytics tools to crunch the data.
Redbird’s platform allows users to run analyses with natural language prompts. Workers can, for example, feed supply chain data into an AI model to find optimization opportunities. Redbird also supports other data analysis methods that lend themselves to tasks such as predicting customer demand.
After completing an analysis, the platform can automatically turn the results into a data visualization. Redbird is capable of generating pie charts, maps and various other graphs. It can also output a natural language explanation of what a given chart displays, as well as package the data into a PowerPoint presentation.
For users with more advanced requirements, Redbird provides the ability to run analyses with SQL and Python. The latter language includes a large number of libraries, or prepackaged code modules, for performing advanced mathematical operations. Those libraries can ease data science tasks such as generating revenue forecasts.
Redbird says its customer count has grown by a factor of seven since its seed round in 2022, though it didn’t provide more specific figures. The software maker now counts, among others, eight of the companies on the Fortune 50 list as customers. Redbird disclosed today that it’s also in the process of onboarding “some of the largest” U.S. government agencies to its platform.