TextQL raises $17M to connect enterprise analytics sprawl — CIOs are already planning to rip out Salesforce for Postgres

He is the co-founder and CEO here to announce fund raise

to talk about enterprise analytics workflows.

I think we had him. Let's check in with the team and make sure that he is here. I believe he is. So, let's bring Ethan Ding in from TexQL into the TVP and Ultradome. Ethan, hello. How are you doing?

What's going on, guys?

Hello.

How you doing?

Uh, how's it going?

It's good. We have two of you. So, please introduce both of you.

And it looks it looks like it's being filmed on a, you know, phone camera from 2005. But,

but, uh, we're excited to have you on.

Hi, I'm Ethan. I'm the co and co-founder or

this is my co-ounder bark they're a CTO uh we're actually at a customer off office office on site uh and this is actually a company

does not I think like like IP bans like Zoom uh from their their internal network which I found out like literally last second phone

no it's great I'm I'm super we're super excited to have you guys on uh walk walk us through history of the company since it's your uh first Yeah. Uh I think we started this at like late 2022. Uh right before Chad GPT came out. Uh we had this uh this idea that uh we if we if we spent a lot of uh money and uh time on like try to make analytics work. Uh it'd be uh it'd be worth something. We we really didn't know what we were doing when we first got started. Uh since then what we've like really like realized is um after after like two years of uh uh rebuilding the product like 10 times over. Uh we landed on something where you know I think like the typical enterprise has like 150 databases uh 10 different dashboards BI tools. They have like 20,000 different charts another like 400,000 tables and every single vendor wants you to like migrate into their thing and like drop another $20 million on like systems integrator for another 10 years to like do the migrations. We were like like let's like build a thing that can like connect everything um and and and hopefully be um uh the do do for do for analytics what uh or like high frequency trading firms at the like stock markets.

What was the first uh like analytics stack? Because if you're pre uh GPTs, are you just doing like word clouds or like clustering based on keywords and tagging different phrases as they flow through a system? like what what what was the initial like okay uh there's a stream of data there's a bunch of text in a variety of databases like how are you giving the customers value from that

well it was pre- chat GBT but still post GBT so we had GBT3 uh and but um I think uh as we all know at this point the uh the the IQ of that was way overstated at least for business stuff and so we had tech box on the right we type in your question sure like how do I get revenue you then a text box on on the left with with the SQL and then

you run it and then you uh copy it and then paste it into your whatever tool.

Interesting.

And then that was it.

But we've come a long way from that.

So what walk us through I mean you don't have to tell us what customer you're with today, but uh what does actually uh as a group of co-founders going to a customer site like what are you doing? How deep in the weeds are you? Is it just sort of like a high level pitch or are you rolling up your sleeves and and working on actual integration?

Yeah. Well, I I think like today's session was basically um like walk us through like the the I mean every single Fortune 500 company like basically spends like nine figures on like AWS, GCP, and Azure. They spend another like like 10 figures on like paper that like like like manages all these systems. Um, and and it's kind of this like constant like war of like you go from like spending $20 million to like like a terod data on prem to like spending like $30 million with like a data brick in the cloud or something. Um, and and so like what we're what we're we're trying to map out with them is uh anthropic is telegraphing that they want to be the size of AWS in like three years, right? And they're an enterpriseoriented company. They expect that basically come out of like um companies like the that we're working with like budgets. And so it's like they basically expect them to take their entire IT budget of like let's say like 2003 $300 million, double it and like like materialize this money out of like thin air and like spend it on infrance and they're they're they're walking us through like the the um parts of their road map where you know what kind of SAS can they sunset, what kind of labor costs are they like thinking about like the trade-offs around um on like what time horizons to like create up and also like like what kind of like workloads that are going to be extremely expensive that they can like kind of like start uh basically triaging off like the large like models cuz because at the end of like these are these are kind of the people like when you see like the token charts like everyone token maxing these are kind of the people who like pay the bills on like those token and like like they notice the size of that bill like you know like blowing up like 10x like year over year. Yeah.

Um interesting. It's interesting side of the equation that I guess like people don't spend a ton of time talking about.

Yeah. How have you been processing the SAS apocalypse narrative? Uh Beni off was given some push back. Uh other folks were very bullish on it. There's a whole bunch of different data points. I've been just shocked that uh we haven't seen revenue uh declines from really any software company that's been targeted. Although, you know, you could talk about the long term, but the the the growth like these companies are still growing even if they are in like the direct path of the AI companies.

Yeah. I for like the for the longest time I assumed that like everyone likes to buy like good enough. Um, I think really in the past like three months I've heard like like six different CIOS or CEOs of like Fortune 100s like talk about how they're ready to like like Salesforce is like increased like their headless like tax and they're ready to like like do like a two-year migration like off into like like Postgress or something.

Um, it's it's not like they're going to another vendor. They're just like I need to free up money to like set on GPU like set GPUs on fire. Sure. And I'll pay like anybody to like like move me into like like a Postgress instance in like like Google Cloud or like AWS.

Interesting. Okay. So, so that's a little bit of your opportunity. You help with migration.

Uh that that one that one's kind of adjacent to us. We we look at a lot more like lowle infrastructure like like data bricks, snowflake, like Tableau and otherwise. But it's it's interest like

a CRM is basically the second most important system of record um at an enterprise next to the ERP. Yeah. they're willing to entertain like moving entirely off CRM within like a two-year time horizon, maybe they'll completely fail, but like the willingness to like like forge into that is then uh like like an order of magnitude more higher than I expected. Kind of crazy.

It's surprising based on the profile of company.

That's something you normally expect from like Google or Facebook like the most mature engineering companies in the world, but you you see this effort starting to come from a hundred-y old companies as well.

Interesting. Interesting. And uh is is is that driven more by they think that over the long term there will be a net cost savings to having their own system or more that they want something that's completely bespoke and more custom to their business. Um, it's mostly not. There's an interesting thing Larry Ellison uh talks about uh when it comes to like enterprise sales, which is that like like enterprise sales is kind of like buying like like um like Gucci bags. Um it's it's much more like like any given year you have a CIO come in like right like the the halfife of like a CIO is like like five years before they retire, new one comes in, they have to like start a set of like new initiatives often like they're going like like they're they're finger testing like the market and trying to figure out like who who has the best vibes. Sure.

And like basically who who okay whoever has the best vibes I'm gonna throw like eight figures against um and I'm gonna like move that eight figures away from like someone like a company that has like like worst vibes.

Sure. There's this like weird um self-fulfilling prophecy where

they're vibe procuring.

Yeah.

They're vibe procuring.

Like you walk into a room, you can tell when that like company's stock is up. You can tell when the CEO is like extremely cocky. You can tell like when the when the FDES and the sales people are like listen like you don't even have to move this today. I'm going to get your business next year no matter what because I know we're on the up and you can also like tell when like a vendor is like desperate, right? And they're like like moving for discounts, right? When when when some when when as long as the perception that a company like the market is short a given like SAS vendor, um customers start asking for discounts, the most aggressive ones go first. But now like all the sellers on that team are like like bad like you know they're traumatized between like the next set of renewals. So they're they're progressively going to give more and more ground. Um, it's kind of a rough uh, yeah, wouldn't want to be one of those right now.

Interesting. Interesting. Well, uh, your business is growing. You're raising money. Tell us about the latest round.

Yeah, we um, we it was actually like a like a two two-part round. Um, the first uh, like led by like Hoff Capital and the latest part like

uh, Blackstone.

How much did you raise?

Uh, I think it's 17 in total.

What? This was a This was awesome, guys. I really I really uh enjoyed speaking with you both and uh thank you for making time on uh while while you're