We’re excited to announce that the Innovation Fund has recently invested in Omni, a business intelligence and embedded analytics platform built to unlock self-service analytics.
Omni combines flexible data exploration with governed analytics. Their analysis tools — including SQL, Excel functions, and AI — enable business users and developers to quickly find answers and contribute to a shared data layer that ensures consistent metrics across the organization.
Omni is backed by other prominent VC firms such as First Round, Redpoint, Snowflake Ventures, and Theory Ventures (which itself is another investment in the Innovation Fund).
An overview of Omni
Omni was founded in 2022 by CEO Colin Zima, President Jamie Davidson, and CTO Christopher Merrick, who spent a decade building some of the most well-known data products in the space: Looker (acquired by Google in 2019) and Stitch (acquired by Talend in 2018).
They teamed up to bridge a gap in the analytics landscape between “decentralized” and “centralized” tools. While decentralized tools like Tableau provide widespread access to analytics, they lack shared metrics and definitions, which often leads to inconsistent results. In contrast, centralized tools like Looker or MicroStrategy promote consistency, but they can be slow, expensive, and tedious for data teams to manage. Faced with these tradeoffs, customers often resort to purchasing multiple tools to meet their needs.
Omni aims to help customers unlock the full potential of their data by serving as an all-in-one business intelligence platform. To democratize data access, Omni allows everyone—from data teams to business users—to analyze information however they prefer, whether that's a point-and-click interface, Excel formulas, SQL, or AI. As users query, they build a shared data model that others can access, helping drive consistent metrics across their organization. Companies can also use Omni to build their own embedded analytics, adding customer-facing dashboards and reports to their product without needing to build their own data platform.
Despite being in business for just over 2 years, Omni has already generated an impressive list of customers, including Condé Nast, Perplexity, and ILIA Beauty.
Fundrise as an investor and a customer
The Innovation Fund’s investment in Omni represents our continued commitment to our data infrastructure thesis we laid out as the Fund was ramping up. It’s also yet another investment in a company of which we ourselves are customers. Like dbt, Canva, Databricks, Vanta, and others before it, we believe our first-hand exposure as users and customers of Omni puts us in a unique position to evaluate their company from an investment perspective.
After a thorough market evaluation of the leading companies offering BI tooling and platforms, we recently switched from a combination of Looker and Tableau to Omni for all of our growth-related business intelligence needs. The positive impact became clear almost immediately. A greater share of our team is now producing valuable analysis faster and with more confidence, and we’ve been able to consolidate work from two tools into one. If you’re interested in learning more about our experience, you can view the case study Omni recently published on their website.
Omni has been incredibly well-received across the organization. Below are a few highlights of the feedback we’ve gotten from various stakeholders across the organization.
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“Omni's shared models help us codify important aspects of our business, ensuring transparency and alignment across teams. It's also a much better value compared to our legacy systems where cost had really gotten out of hand relative to the value and pace of innovation we were seeing.”
- Louie Tambellini “Omni empowers consistency and governance that isn't possible with decentralized tools like Tableau, while allowing for flexibility and freedom that isn't possible with centralized tools like Looker. It strikes a balance in a way that no other tool has.”
- Jack Ploshnick “With Tableau, it was hard to drill down a layer deeper from the standard dashboard without bothering the data team. There were dozens of questions I never got answered because I didn't want to slow down our data team with exploratory, lower-value work. With Omni, I’ve been able to better understand aspects of my business unit because I can quickly get answers on my own.”
- Chris Nanda |
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As both a customer and investor of Omni, we’re excited to continue watching the company grow. If you’re considering a new business intelligence platform, we’d strongly encourage you to consider Omni. We think you’ll be as happy with it as we are.
