Databricks invests in Catalyst, targeting the elusive customer intelligence category

New York-based Catalyst, an organization mobilizing buyer knowledge for enterprise development, right this moment introduced it has obtained strategic funding from Databricks Ventures, the enterprise capital arm of Databricks.

Whereas the quantity infused stays undisclosed, the transfer marks Databricks’ first funding within the rising buyer intelligence class. Previous to this, the Ali Ghodsi-led knowledge and AI firm had primarily backed distinguished knowledge stack gamers resembling dbt Labs, Matilion, and Alation. 

Catalyst mentioned the funding would deepen the mixing between its providing and Databricks’ lakehouse, enabling a greater consumer expertise for his or her joint prospects. 

Catalyst presents buyer intelligence for retention, upsell

Based in 2016, Catalyst is an SaaS platform that aggregates buyer knowledge from a number of sources into one intuitive view and supplies gross sales and success groups detailed insights into buyer maturity, well being and upsell potential.

“We assist enterprises manage all of their buyer knowledge from CRMs like Salesforce, buyer utilization knowledge from platforms like Databricks, Redshift and BigQuery, and every other consumer knowledge (like assist tickets, emails) that will dwell inside instruments like Mixpanel, Zendesk, Jira and Gmail,” Edward Chiu, Catalyst’s CEO, instructed VentureBeat.

As soon as this knowledge is organized, Catalyst performs analytics, powered by Databricks’ lakehouse and AI engine, to establish which prospects are prepared for upsell/growth and which of them are vulnerable to going away. It additionally pairs the insights with automation capabilities to mechanically take mandatory actions — like sending focused emails — for every buyer on the proper time.

With this funding, Catalyst is increasing its engagement with Databricks, enabling joint prospects to straight combine the info they’ve of their Databricks lakehouse. The corporate says this may simplify the consumer expertise and allow prospects to get extra worth from their current investments in Catalyst and Databricks. 

As a part of this, Chiu mentioned, Catalyst and Databricks additionally plan to launch a product characteristic the place AI-driven predictive intelligence will present alerts when a buyer is able to spend extra money. The characteristic can be referred to as Enlargement Sign. 

Opponents

Whereas firms like Gainsight and Totango function in the identical area as Catalyst, Chiu claims they’re legacy options constructed on outdated structure and never trendy of their knowledge ingestion workflows. He mentioned Catalyst’s integration with Databricks can onboard/implement prospects inside weeks, as in opposition to greater than six months taken by different options. 

This leads to sooner ROI, which is vital within the present financial state of affairs the place firms are struggling to get new prospects and seeking to extract extra income from current ones. 

Notably, the CEO added that Catalyst is the one platform that proactively tells enterprises which of their playbooks are literally producing constructive leads to buyer adoption or elevated spending. 

Previous to this funding, the corporate had raised a complete of $65 million and its final public valuation was $245 million.