Finding the Outliers: Creating the Modern Era of Automated Business Analysis

Today, I am proud to formally welcome Outlier.ai into the Emergence family. Earlier this year, we led their $22.1M Series B, and as our first investment of the new decade, Outlier holds a lot of meaning.

My relationship with Outlier’s CEO & Co-Founder Sean Byrnes goes back several years when he was kind enough to help me break down my research of the first generation of cloud-native BI applications. Through his guidance and expertise, Emergence developed a thesis that the cloud could democratize data, empowering all business users to access and analyze their data to drive decisions.

For the past few years, my team and I have been intensely studying the business intelligence landscape. During that time, we met with every new cloud BI application. While we found plenty of compelling startups, we did not find the outlier we wanted to back. However, last year our search came full circle when we met back up with Sean.

Sean and his team created a truly unique approach to business intelligence. Outlier is augmenting business decision makers with AI-driven automated analysis that identifies unexpected changes, patterns, and behavior, extracting root causes in data. With Outlier, business users are given the answers before they even ask the question. This may sound impossible but the results speak for themselves as Outlier has grown revenue by more than 400% in the last 12 months and analyzed over four billion metrics for customers.

Our team jumped at the opportunity to partner with Outlier co-founders Sean and Mike. They have been mission-driven and a 'values first' company since day one, and that has helped them recruit an exceptional team. We rarely see such talented and experienced executives join early-stage startups and that is a testament to Outlier’s culture. Sean has a company building philosophy of “go slow to go fast later,” which has directly resulted in a strong foundation of happy customers, rapid technical innovation and an exceptional team. Our investment will further accelerate strategic hires, so please check out outlier.ai/careers to join the Outlier family.

In the beginning, Sean said his vision was: “In five years, we will look back at companies that had five dozen dashboards, and it will look as outdated as using a paper map.” And with each day, we are excited to partner with Outlier to make that vision a reality!