Pyramid Analytics Scores $120M In New Funding, Plans Channel Expansion

The financing news comes as the “decision intelligence” platform company looks to grow sales – and boost its visibility in the business analytics industry – through an extended go-to-market alliance with Amazon Web Services.

Decision intelligence software developer Pyramid Analytics has raised $120 million in a Series E round of funding that the company will apply to accelerating development of its business analytics software and to expanding its channel partnerships.

The funding news Monday comes on the heels of Pyramid Analytics joining Amazon Web Services’ ISV Accelerate program through which Pyramid and AWS will co-sell and support the Pyramid Decision Intelligence Platform on the AWS cloud.

“All elements are in place to speed Pyramid down the path to being the next enterprise analytics leader,” said Omri Kohl, Pyramid Analytics co-founder and CEO, in a statement announcing the funding. “Overwhelming interest from the venture capital community underscores the importance of the problems we help our customers solve and the innovations we introduced to help enterprises in ways BI tools and legacy analytics could not.”

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Pyramid Analytics, headquartered in Amsterdam, develops its unified decision intelligence software that enables governed self-service analytics in a no-code environment. The company’s flagship Pyramid Decision Intelligence Platform combines business analytics, data preparation and data science capabilities with AI guidance functionality.

Decision intelligence, identified by market research firm Gartner as a top strategic technology trend for 2022, goes beyond traditional business analytics by combining data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning with human decision workflows to help businesses make more accurate decisions more quickly. The idea is that a broader range of information and line-of-business workers can use decision intelligence tools as part of their everyday decision-making tasks.

Pyramid Analytics, which operates regional headquarters in London, U.K.; Tel Aviv, Israel; and New York City, said in the Monday announcement that the $120 million Series E round brings the company’s total venture capital funding to $211 million.

The funding round was led by H.I.G. Growth Partners with participation from Clal Insurance Enterprise Holdings, Kingfisher Capital and General Oriental Investments. Previous investors who participated in the round include JVP, Maor Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Viola Growth.

Pyramid said the funding will be used to continue developing the company’s decision intelligence platform to “maintain a technology advantage” over such competitors as Tableau Software, Qlik and Microsoft’s Power BI.

The company also plans to leverage the additional funding to expand its global presence (about 40 percent of its sales are in North America) and capture a larger share of the big data and business analytics addressable market, which market researcher IDC calculated at $215.7 billion in 2021.

That effort includes increasing the number of channel partnerships it has with technology companies, independent software vendors, VARs, consulting firms and systems integrators – especially regional and “boutique” SIs. Growing and nurturing Pyramid’s partner ecosystem is critical to having the reach, scale, regional knowledge, and vertical expertise to acquire and retain customers, says Chas Kielt, vice president of global corporate communications and partner marketing at Pyramid Analytics, in a provided comment to CRN.

“We’ll invest more in forming technology alliances and partnerships with independent software vendors, consulting firms, value-added resellers (VAR) and systems integrators,” Kielt said. “Immediate plans include evaluation of a market development funds program and retaining a channel acceleration agency to develop recruitment and go-to-market programs. We’re also hiring channel pros in the US, UKI, and Nordics.”

Today the channel, also including OEM partners, account for a little more than one-half of Pyramid Analytics’ sales, said Dave Henry, senior vice president of strategic alliances at Pyramid Analytics, in an interview with CRN. The company is especially looking to expand its work with larger global systems integrators.

“We’ll source a lot of opportunities through partners going forward,” Henry said.

The impressive funding round should increase Pyramid Analytics’ market visibility, which got a boost April 20 with the announcement that the company had joined AWS ISV Accelerate, the cloud giant’s co-sell program for independent software partners whose products run on, or integrate with, AWS cloud services.

Pyramid Analytics, a long-time player in the Microsoft world, redeveloped its software in recent years to support multiple databases and multiple cloud platforms. Today customers are largely running the Pyramid Decision Intelligence Platform on either Microsoft Azure or AWS with a few running it within on-premises private clouds.

The company became an AWS partner in 2019, running its analytics software on the AWS cloud, and began offering its software through the AWS Marketplace in December 2020. The Pyramid Decision Intelligence Platform has been validated through the AWS Foundational Technical review and supports AWS data sources including Amazon Redshift, Amazon Relational Database Service, Amazon S3 storage and other Amazon services.

Joining the AWS ISV Accelerate Program takes the relationship to the next level, said Henry, speaking from London where he was attending AWS Summit London 2022. “There is the opportunity to get a lot more visibility for our brand,” Henry said.

Joining the AWS ISV Innovate Program provides Pyramid Analytics with access to AWS customers through AWS field sellers globally and the company is eligible for co-sell sales and support enablement resources. The company’s software is available through a streamlined procurement and billing process: Customers can buy the software as a pay-as-you-go service and can use AWS Enterprise Discount Program resources.

As part of the AWS ISV Innovate Program Pyramid Analytics is eligible for Consulting Partner Private Offers, the AWS Marketplace sales model through which ISV partners can authorize channel partners to sell on their behalf and those partners are recognized by AWS as the seller of record.

Henry said Pyramid Analytics and AWS have been working on the expanded partnership for more than 18 months. The company had to demonstrate its technical qualifications, put together a business plan and bring in 10 sales opportunities.

AWS, which is heavily focused on cloud-based IT infrastructure, stands to gain from the relation because Pyramid Analytics brings more business users to the table, Henry said.

“When we look at our go-to-market initiatives with AWS, a lot of it is going to be focused on. How do we educate business users about getting more value out of AWS – which will naturally mean business users working with IT professionals,” Henry said. “And this idea that you can have a decision intelligence platform to do that is key to what we are doing.”

Joining AWS ISV Innovate also expands Pyramid Analytics’ footprint within the SAP application world by providing the company’s data analysis services for SAP HANA and SAP BW4/HANA running on the AWS cloud. Pyramid Analytics is already an ISV member of the SAP PartnerEdge program.

Pyramid Analytics on AWS can also be used with other database and data platforms running on AWS including Snowflake, Databricks and Exasol.