Veezoo is a smart virtual assistant that empowers non-technical users to get fast, meaningful business insights from cloud databases using natural-language questions
What if you could just ask? That’s the question the founders of Swiss data analytics startup Veezoo set out to answer during a 2015 hackathon. Frustrated by their own experiences using queries to derive meaningful analytics from enterprise databases, the team set out to develop a human-centric approach to extract useful business intelligence from any database. Their initial proof of concept won the hackathon, and Veezoo was born.
“Today’s business intelligence systems are frustratingly dumb and unintuitive. They feature complicated 1990s drag-and-drop interfaces that confuse non-technical users,” said Marcos Monteiro, co-founder and CEO of Veezoo. “We wondered why nobody had created an intelligent system to make it easy for people without a degree in computer science to get the answers they need from cloud data warehouses. So, we decided to build one.”
Six years later, their initial concept has evolved into a sophisticated ‘Siri for enterprises’ that turns natural-language queries of a cloud database into insightful answers in the form of text, data tables, and rich visualizations. Veezoo’s ‘connect once, explore everything’ philosophy empowers sales, marketing, and operations teams to get instant answers to complex questions, understand and compare dynamic trends, and derive insightful business analytics—all without hiring a data scientist or asking the IT department to implement a costly business intelligence module.
Veezoo encourages data exploration
“We know from experience that some of the best insights are triggered by the spark of an idea — an ad-hoc question that occurs during a meeting. We wanted to give decision makers a tool that encourages a free-form, inquisitive thinking process. Veezoo is a powerful business analytics tool that fosters exploration and supports our natural curiosity to make sense of information,” added Monteiro.
Veezoo’s simplicity and ease of use belies its true power. Veezoo’s proprietary NLP technology decodes the complex structure and content—effectively the meaning—of a cloud database, and then instantly responds to complex questions (currently asked in English, German, Italian and French) with meaningful and insightful answers.
Yamo, a DTC provider of organic baby food, has been using Veezoo to make fast, data-informed decisions. “Prior to Veezoo, our marketing team could not get all the answers they needed from our sales data in order to adjust to a highly dynamic business environment,” said Tobias Gunzenhauser, CEO of yamo. “Veezoo is so simple to use that it has created a facts-first culture in which everyone can make data-supported decisions in real time.”
A major innovation that Veezoo brings to the market is the ability to understand compound questions. For example, a user can first ask “Which were the top 5 machine products sold by our Zurich office?” and then ask “Which corporate customers bought these products?”
Also unique to Veezoo is its ability to automatically suggest useful, related answers based on common follow-up questions. For example, “Show me last year’s sales” will yield the right answer, along with breakdowns by category or region.
Veezoo connects to popular cloud-based data warehouses from Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Snowflake, and more. Underway are connectors for market-specific databases such as Shopify or Salesforce.
Designed for data-driven professionals
Veezoo is ideal for fast-track, emerging companies with an urgent need for accessible data analytics but have yet to invest heavily in business intelligence. It is particularly relevant for companies that are rapidly amassing data in data-intensive industries:
- Veezoo is for ecommerce store owners that want to understand the key drivers of their business—from identifying which marketing activities deliver the highest conversion rates to identifying friction points along the purchasing process.
- Veezoo is for marketing teams that don’t want to limit themselves to overall metrics and need to get a deep understanding of which marketing activities are working — and which are not
- Veezoo is for sales managers who are frustrated with the limitations of their sales dashboards and don’t have the time to wait for someone to build new dashboards for them.
Powerful data exploration accessed via a conversational interface
Formulating a database query in plain English is fast and easy. Simply ask a question and visualize the answer—no more drag-and-dropping data variables, calculating formulas, and building charts and dashboards. Veezoo encourages database interrogation; a user can ask follow-up questions and scroll up and down through the entire data exploration story.
Flexible semantic capabilities that support a dynamic business
Veezoo delivers market leading accuracy right out of the box, but its built-in semantic modeling can be extended by data teams to achieve even higher accuracy. This hybrid approach differs from rigid ‘black box’ models that struggle to adapt to the unique characteristics of a rapidly evolving business.
The fastest time to value
Unlike classic data analytics and business intelligence systems that require months of integration and user training, Veezoo users put data-driven insights to work in minutes. For qualified customers, Veezoo offers a “no-risk” trial that includes initial set-up support and training.
