Generative artificial intelligence startup TextQL Inc., the company has successfully closed $4.1 million in funding across two rounds—pre-seed and seed. The financing was co-led by Neo and DCM, featuring participation from prominent backers including Unshackled Ventures, Worklife Ventures, PageOne Ventures, FirstHand Ventures, and Indicator Fund. Additionally, influential angel investors such as Tristan Handy (dbt Labs Inc. CEO), Chris Prucha (Notion Inc. founder), and Matt Kraning (Observe Inc. CTO) have thrown their support behind TextQL.
TextQL is pioneering a generative AI-powered data analyst, named Ana, designed to function as a chatbot assistant for enterprise workers. Ana is poised to revolutionize the way companies interact with their business intelligence tools, seamlessly integrating with existing documentation and semantic layers. The startup’s mission is to automate every aspect of the enterprise data lifecycle by emulating the experience of collaborating with a human data analyst.
Ethan Ding, co-founder and CEO of TextQL, emphasized the startup’s commitment to addressing challenges that have hindered other self-service data startups. TextQL distinguishes itself by mimicking the hierarchical responses of human analysts, operating across the entire data stack without requiring migration. Ana interfaces with BI tools, queries semantic layers, reads dbt documents, and seeks assistance when needed.
The latest version of Ana boasts a dynamic metadata engine capable of indexing data from platforms such as Google Drive, Microsoft Office, Confluence, and Notion. It’s compatible with popular BI tools like Tableau, Looker, and PowerBI, as well as data platforms like dbt, Cube, and LookML, along with messenger platforms like Slack.
TextQL has already made significant strides, with its platform being utilized by tens of thousands of employees in diverse industries such as healthcare, financial services, and media. While specific customers were not disclosed, the startup has gained recognition for helping non-technical workers access critical data within their organizations.
Hurst Lin, DCM co-founder and General Partner, commended TextQL for making a real impact on helping non-technical workers navigate internal data. The funding infusion will fuel TextQL’s expansion plans, including the hiring of software engineers and forward-deployed engineers to strengthen its data engineering and language model training teams. The startup aims to onboard ten new customers in the next quarter and plans further integrations to accommodate diverse semantic layers, BI platforms, and data catalogs.
Ali Partovi, CEO of Neo, expressed enthusiasm for TextQL’s vision and technical leadership, highlighting the potential of AI to streamline data organization for thousands of enterprise workers. TextQL’s transformative approach, exemplified by Ana, is poised to unlock a surge in data usage, enabling anyone in an organization to access insights by simply asking questions, eliminating the need for manual query construction by engineers.